Myth Happens

And then I got home and my brain fell over. I am not sure that I have the mental wherewithal tonight to describe sufficiently the experience of seeing a midnight showing of Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with rushthatspeaks. For starters, it was really good.

I think the most salient note I want to make for myself is the same recognition that so impressed me about A Field in England (2013): the past is not just another country, it's another planet. Nobody in The Devils is modern. Sometimes they look like it—their motives are comprehensible to a twenty-first-century audience, we recognize their passions and frustrations, they take stands with which we sympathize and behave in ways we approve or condemn. But nothing about the way they think is of our mind. We would call Oliver Reed's Father Grandier a faithless priest: a sophist and serial womanizer whose sexual charisma extends from the housewives of Loudon to the convent of the Ursulines, a wealthy and handsome man who walks fearlessly into the houses of the plague-stricken and sends his pregnant lover back to her family and marries a woman of no particular standing because he cannot have her without the sacrament. His faith is so deeply dyed through him that it cannot be separated from his political stubborness and his pride, his fierce protectiveness toward his city, his inability to comprehend how women's lives are not men's, or perhaps that women have lives at all; he does not consider questions we would consider obvious and essential, like the impossibility of an unmarried girl of good family conceiving without consequences or the immediate jeopardy of a man's wife once he is a political target, accused of sorcery and heresy. He is surprised to discover himself a martyr, but we were told already by no less an authority than Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue!) that the Jesuits had him for the first seven years of his life: he's unbreakable. (Not stoic. He knows the difference.) He's head-smackingly self-centered. He trusts the King of France implicitly; it never occurs to him that the royal guarantee of Loudun's independence might be as whimsically revoked as a box of marzipans. And not once does he question a world in which hell and its devils are real, as real as God who has sent the plague to Loudun and watches every move of Grandier's life from fornication to confrontation to marriage to the stake. He does not think in our time; he does not live in it. This is true of every character in the film, from the merrily brutal Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) to the terrifying witch-hunter Barré (Michael Gothard) with his flying hair and his steel-rimmed spectacles and his bare arms and strings of rosaries—Rush said they had seen him before, only in anime—to red-haired, crook-backed Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) who dreams of Grandier as Christ and accuses him, in full knowledge of what she does, of being the Devil. They move within a world we know from paintings and treatises and altarpieces. The Enlightenment is just around the corner, but no one living in Loudun during this film is going to see it. Grandier is humane, but he's not a humanist. His death is a saint's. It is not the most devastating depiction of martyrdom on film, because it's not Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), just as it is not the most apocalyptic vision of the plague, because it's not Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957)—and it doesn't seem possible that Russell had never seen either film before making The Devils—but those are not bad shadows to stand in. Talking in the car afterward, we did figure out that the film undercuts its own alienation of the past with its cinematography: the script and the acting are all seventeenth-century, but the camera looks at things with a human eye, rather than the eye of God. Sometimes it is strange enough. Too often it reminds you there's a person on the other side of the lens. Rush might be right that the film would have been unbearable had it all been filmed seventeenth-century, but I think it could have done more with the difference. We agreed that it doesn't need to look at Grandier like the hero. That's modern.

We must have seen the cut version; it was a 35mm print. I'd like to see the missing scenes if they've been restored and integrated with the theatrical release: the film was not tame without them, but at least one was the obvious next beat and then the camera cut away instead. The production design is by Derek Jarman. It is instantly recognizable by his eye for color and his way of organizing space and the human figures within it. The walls of Loudun are astonishing, so white and monumental, they look like stage sets; it is actually weird to see them crumble into individual bricks when Laubardemont gives the order to pull them down—it's an almost organic, decaying effect. They turn from bulwarks to broken teeth and bones. I also want to know if he directed the opening masque ("A most original conception, Your Majesty," Richelieu says dryly to the slender and seashell-adorned Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), who is almost not breathing hard from the exertions of his dance; his smiling mask of a face is brushed around the eyes with sea-silver, his lips gilded with paint—"the Birth of Venus") because it looks for all the world like an outtake from The Tempest (1977) or Edward II (1991) or some Super 8 footage I haven't seen yet. Tableaux throughout also recall his later work, which means I cannot tell how much of his painter's eye affected the film and how much Russell influenced him. I suppose I'll have to see more Ken Russell to find out. Suddenly that doesn't seem like a terrible idea. I had always heard The Devils described as a legendary piece of X-rated nunsploitation. We were almost an hour into the film before we got any lesbianism, all right?

Oh, hey. The sun came up. I'm going to bed.