A nunnery hothouse melodrama—no, not that kind—Black Narcissus looks and feels like no other movie I can think of. A gorgeous production from the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death), it’s steamy but never seamy, at once ardent and honest in its exploration of matters of faith.
Based on a 1939 novel by Rumer Godden, the film takes place in an abandoned palace on a Himalayan mountaintop, where a convent of British nuns have been sent in order to set up a school and hospital. Led by the young, resolute Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), they attempt to do so in the face of unceasing winds, indifferent villagers, and a strapping English agent, Mr. Dean (David Farrar), who serves as a middleman between the British government and the local general given nominal authority over the region. “There’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated,” Mr. Dean says, perhaps in an attempt to excuse his own habit of speaking in innuendo.
It’s that heightened atmosphere that defines Black Narcissus, elevating the movie into a peculiar, rare jewel of its own—much like those worn by the general’s princely son, who desires to study at the convent’s school and falls for Kanchi, a troublesome local girl who has been sent there as punishment. (Sabu, of Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad, is delicately refined as the prince, while Jean Simmons, although in unfortunate brownface, brings a raw eroticism to the part of Kanchi.) Through the sound design and emphasis on the movement of cloth within the frame, Powel and Pressburger make the mountain wind omnipresent. Meanwhile, the use of Technicolor—a hallmark of theirs during this period—causes the screen to throb, especially when the bland, off-white habits of the nuns are placed opposite the ornate attire worn by Kanchi and the prince. And then there is the “blue room,” a central space—it’s where the prince and Kanchi first meet—that has somehow retained its lurid color, even as the rest of the palace has fallen into disrepair.
Most striking of all, however, are the matte paintings employed throughout the film, giving depth and distance to a movie that was set in the Himalayas yet filmed entirely in England. “I think you can see too far,” one nun says of the view, trying to explain why the locale has sent her into a spiritual crisis. Later, there is a shot of Sister Clodagh from above as she rings the church bell, which has been placed on the precipice of the cliff. Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage.
As Sister Clodagh, Kerr uses her eyes to suggest that Clodagh also has been seeing “too far” since arriving at the palace. (The movie also offers flashbacks, via delicate dissolves, to Clodagh’s life before she became a nun.) Mr. Dean is part of her discombobulation, as he is for Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth, whose passion turns her into a tragic, nearly demonic figure. Yet Black Narcissus doesn’t go for a cheap, lust-versus-religion paradigm, despite a saucy montage suggesting a battle between lipstick and a Bible. Hardly programmatic, Black Narcissus is an open, complicated conversation about what it means to live as a follower of Jesus in the world, where we are each a sinner and a saint. Note that for all his status as an object of desire, Mr. Dean also offers some of the movie’s sharpest theology—and I’m not just talking about the moment he barges into a Christmas service and drunkenly joins in on the hymns. He’s looking for something spiritual that the nuns, for all their religiosity, haven’t yet figured out how to provide.
(7/17/2024)
