Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Melville.
Written by: Jean-Pierre Melville
based on the novel by Béatrice Beck.
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Léon
Morin), Emmanuelle Riva (Barny), Irène Tunc (Christine Sangredin), Nicole Mirel
(Sabine Levy), Gisèle Grimm (Lucienne), Marco Behar (Edelman), Monique Bertho
(Marion), Marc Eyraud (Anton), Monique Hennessy (Arlette), Edith Loria
(Danielle Holdenberg).
Leon
Morin, Priest is an odd film for the three principals who made it. For director
Jean-Pierre Melville, it is a film set during the German occupation of France –
which he explored in his first film, Le Silence de la Mar (1949) and would
later explore in his masterpiece Army of Shadows (1969) – but it’s only partly
about that. For Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the title character, it is one of
the films he followed up Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless with – that film made him
a star and a sex symbol. The real main character though is Barny, played by
Emmanuelle Riva, also on the heels of a film that made her a star – Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Yet, when you hear that Melville is making a
film about the time of German occupation, you envision a thriller of some sort
a film about the resistance. And yet, Leon Morin, Priest is really more of a
religious conversation – taking place mainly in a room, where these two
characters talk about religion. There is an undercurrent of sexual attraction
between the two of them, unspoken mostly, but it’s certainly something both
characters realize. He enjoys these sexual and theological games the two of
them play – she’s not the only young woman who visits him in his room, although
their relationship is different. The only thing that really makes him upset is
that if you explicitly reference the sexual tension in the room.
The
two of them meet when she storms into confessional one day, not to confess her
sins, but to tell the priest that religion is the opiate of the masses. She is
a communist and an atheist, a widow with a half Jewish daughter on the father’s
side, who has relocated to this small town in the French Alps when the
correspondence school she works at relocated there from Paris, when the
occupation started. At first, it’s the Italians who are the occupying force,
with silly hats with feathers in them. Things get more serious when the Germans
arrive, and the Jews start being rounded up. With a couple of other women, she
conspires to have their children baptized to try and protect them – and
eventually, she will send her daughter away to live with a couple of old women
on a farm, to get her out of the way. Perhaps she simply storms into that
confessional to confront the priest because she’s bored and frustrated –
spoiling for a fight, but unsure of who she can argue with.
For
his part, Morin the priest doesn’t rise to the bait. He acknowledges that
religion is used by some as an opiate, and responds equally mildly to her other
accusations about the church’s obsession with material wealth –all the things
churches have in them, and how they respond to wealthy people, while still
defending the church – and more importantly, faith – itself. He’ll give her
books to read, and then they come back together to discuss them – and
everything else. The pair of them are clearly attracted to each other – they
flirt in a strange way. We are privy to her thoughts – but not his. She
obsessed over some slight movements on his part – the way he “accidentally”
allows his cassock to brush against her during mass one day for instance.
With
him, she allows herself to say what she could not to others. She is clearly a
sexual being – with an attraction to another woman in the office, and perhaps
women in general. He isn’t shocked by this. We see him with a few of the other
young women who come into his office – one who is determined to sleep with him.
He shuts that down very quickly, almost rudely. As long as these conversations
remain the abstract – he seems to enjoy the underlining sexual tension in them.
We don’t see him talk to any men for example – although to be fair, we don’t
see many men anyway (when we do, at the tail end of the baptism sequence, they
leave the church to go back to the woods, back to the resistance).
Leon
Morin, Priest is a film about a lot of things. Yes, it’s about religion. The
religious conversations that Leon and Barny are real. She comes to him with her
doubts, and he doesn’t dismiss them – but he does have an argument for all of
them, that is rooted in Catholicism. It is about politics and the occupation as
well. It’s interesting that she clearly hates the Nazis, and yet doesn’t join
the resistance herself, or even distance herself from her friend, who looks far
more kindly on the Nazis, and far less charitably on the Jews. The politics and
religion are linked – because as an atheist, she thinks separating people on
the basis of religion is silly. Her daughter, who could be carted away, isn’t
even really a Jew – and baptizing her didn’t really make her Catholic either.
And it is about sex. Perhaps she keeps going to him for no other reason than
that there are no eligible men around – they’re fighting, somewhere, or in the
forest – and if she is a lesbian, or at least bi-sexual, that’s not the type of
thing you can be open about. And Morin clearly relishes his role – he likes to
get the women turned on, in a way, and then leave them wanting – he enjoys
teasing them, then admonishing them if they read the “wrong” thing into it
Through
it all, Leon Morin remains kind of an enigma. You get the sense that he is
enjoying the sexual tension with these various women – but he very clearly has
a line that he draws as well. He is a good priest – a progressive priest for
his time who likes to live in the world of ideas. By the end, when he’s being
transferred out to the countryside, he kind of adopts the posture of a willful martyr
– he knows no one where he’s going will care about his books, that before he
can talk about the things that really matter, he’ll also have to talk about
livestock – but he will convert the world, one village at a time. But who is he
really? What will he become? It is fitting that the film is called Leon Morin,
Priest even if Barny is clearly the central character in the film. She is a
complex character – rather daringly so for 1961 – and yet, he’s the one everyone
is obsessed with.
It’s
an odd film for Melville. It’s film with no real action in it, and done in a
slightly different style than most of his work. It’s a calmer film – a stiller
film (if that’s a term) in that it’s more a collection of moments and scenes,
rather than a fluid story, which he so excels at. It is, of course, a film
about moral complexity – that doesn’t see anyone either as good or bad,
anything as right or wrong – but rather everyone as a mess of contradictions.
It was Melville’s attempt at mainstream success – and it worked, perhaps
largely because he was able to get Belmondo and Riva in the leads, and knows
that at many in the audience are there to see how hot Belmondo is, even dressed
as a priest. It’s perhaps a little too long (the version I saw, on the
Criterion Channel runs 128 minutes, not the 117 minutes it lists on IMBD) – and
eventually, you do tire a little or Morin’s games – Barny deserves more than
this. But for this time, and place – Morin is the best she can do. There is a
quality in her voiceover narration of someone looking back at her past – and
perhaps being a little angry with herself for falling for it, while also
maintaining a certain nostalgic longing for Morin. Their relationship is still
complex, even viewed in the rearview mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment