Mother Joan of the Angels
Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Initial release: The Devil and the Nun (UK)
There’s
a stigma with foreign film in the United States, often derided as too
artsy or incomprehensible (especially if it’s French.) But foreign film has always been a goldmine for quality cinema, and moviegoers in America often could see some great stuff that, at least up until the 1960s, the Hays code would never in a million years give the greenlight on. Take Mother Joan of the Angels, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's creepy tale of obsession and possession.
Mother Joan is loosely based on a famous case in 1632 of demon possession in a French convent in Loudun, when a charismatic, womanizing priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused by the local Mother Superior of bewitching her and her nuns in revenge for his rejecting an offer to lead the convent. Mother Jeanne, supposedly obsessed with Grandier and in a jealous rage, talked one of his political enemies into taking the seat instead. The ensuing accusations and possessions were used as a pretext by the chief minister, who also didn’t like Grandier, to have him burned at the stake. All in all, messy business.
Kawalerowicz -- who would later direct a weirdly compelling political drama set in ancient Egypt by the title of Pharoah -- moves the action from France to Poland. Rather than focus on
Grandier (renamed to Garniec) it’s set in the aftermath of his trial and
execution, when the nuns are still suffering from possessions (and
would continue to be for another four years.) Father Suryn arrives at
the convent to attempt what four priests before him could not do:
exorcise the nuns, especially Mother Jeanne (renamed to Joan.) While a
mass exorcism (brilliantly acted and shot) seems to cure most of the
nuns (emphasis on seems), Mother Joan is worse than
ever. Nothing Father Suryn does seems to work. After trying and failing
to receive help from the local rabbi (played by the same actor, which
manages to wring at least one meta-joke out of an otherwise tense
scene), he eventually reasons he can take the demons into himself,
instead.
There’s a clear romantic tension in Suryn and Joan’s relationship, and it is through this obscure, forbidden love that Suryn is open to possession, and it’s what drives most of the film, as the characters struggle with the madness within themselves. Early on Suryn tries to give himself a pep-talk in the mirror, and the camera focuses wholly on his reflection; later, after he’s possessed, he looks in the mirror again, and he looks crazed, and the mirror keeps getting knocked about. It drives home the severity of his madness. The exorcism in the church is also one of the creepiest scenes in the film, with something clearly deeply wrong with the nuns (especially Mother Joan) as they move about the room.
The Polish film industry made a lot of bangers around the turn of the 1960s, in large part due to a group of filmmakers that included Kawalerowicz and Andrzej Wajda; with the end of Stalinism in Poland in 1956, filmmakers such as these were emboldened to make the films they wanted to make, the way they wanted to make. The results were nothing short of phenomenal; there's a reason that a sizable majority of Martin Scorcese's twenty-one favorite Polish films date between 1956 and 1965 -- including Mother Joan of the Angels.