Great post, Drucker. I agree with a lot of what you say about this film’s engagement with those big themes, order and nature. There’s something a bit Wuthering-Heights-ish about the main setting: it’s so elevated, so exposed to the elements (the wind, the crystal-clear air, the views of the god-like mountains, the vertiginous abyss), that it serves as a sort of crucible in which all the trappings and artifices of culture are stripped away, and what you’re left with is a lot of uncomfortable truths about nature (human and otherwise).
Mr Dean says, towards the end of the film, that there’s something about the air in this place that makes everything seem ‘exaggerated’. But I’m not sure that’s quite right: this mountain-top palace isn’t ‘over-the-top’, it’s just ‘the top’, a place whose extreme conditions bring out the bare, un-exaggerated truth about things. At one point, Sister Philippa argues that to survive in this place, ‘you either have to be like Mr Dean or the Holy Man: either ignore it or give yourself up to it’. I think Dean is the one who effectively ignores where he is. It seems as though he has made a clear-eyed assessment of this place and decided that his best option is not to engage with it more than he has to. He’s impeccably nonchalant at (almost) all times because he doesn’t really care about anything: as he says to Sister Ruth at the one moment when he loses his cool, ‘I don’t love anyone’. I don’t think he’s lying to cover his attraction to Sister Clodagh, I think this is an honest statement about the defensive stance he’s adopted in order to survive. And of course, it probably hints in a vague way at his own reasons for living out here.
The Holy Man, on the other hand, is the one who has ‘given himself up’ to his surroundings. He is as exposed and as immovable as the mountains he stares at day in, day out. One of the things I love about this film is the constant – and very authentic – use of wind machines to create the sense that everything and everyone in this setting is under continual assault by the elements. When we see the Holy Man, he isn’t simply a picture of static serenity: like everyone in the film, he is constantly ‘moved’, changed and weathered by the wind. We see his chilling impassivity when the drums stop beating to signal the death of his great-nephew (I think I have that right...), and this is reinforced later on when the boy says that the death of Sister Ruth ‘would be a very little thing to him’. The Holy Man’s meditations don’t seem to be aimed at attaining any sort of ‘transcendence’ in the usual sense of the word. What he gives himself up to is his own materiality and mortality, aligning his being with that of the mountains and trees, and allowing himself to decay at the same rate as the other natural phenomena on this high, exposed spot. We can assume that his own death will also be ‘a very little thing to him’. The phrase emphasises the idea that he is like these mountains, a monument oblivious to the ‘little things’ living and dying around (and inside) him.
Clodagh points out that neither approach ‘would do’ for the nuns. Their mission is not to ignore things or accept them, but to try and improve them, but the examples of Dean and the Holy Man indicate that this is impossible. As Drucker says, the nuns’ mission is clearly doomed from the beginning, and while I do think this makes the film a bit limited as drama, it also gives it an insistence and an intensity that are part of its greatness.
Throughout the film, there is a palpable sense of seen and unseen forces working against Saint Faith’s. The wind effects I mentioned earlier contribute to this, making everything seem more animated than it would otherwise be, so that the otherwise still, sober habits of the nuns billow passionately around their bodies, not unlike Kanchi’s virtually transparent dress when she does her dance.
The colour and lighting effects are also part of this. When we go back to Ireland in the flashbacks, the imagery is beautiful but reassuringly familiar. The summer sun glimmering in the lake is juxtaposed with the verdant, rocky cliff-face, the hounds run across rolling green fields, Clodagh is given beautiful emeralds in a tasteful drawing room – I love the way she then runs out into the pitch darkness, as though this were a kind of dream sequence where she leaves the stable comforts of her memories of home for the dark, unknown world she finds herself in now in Mopu.
For most of the film, we’re constantly made aware of the strange and threatening character of the mountain-top setting, most strikingly through the weird, indefinable light and colour that suffuse this place in the evening and at dawn. This is the sort of imagery that frames the climactic confrontation between Clodagh and Ruth. In the film’s existing thread, Matt suggested that there’s a kind of ‘haunted house’ feel to
Black Narcissus, and that’s exactly right. There’s an unstoppable presence here that menaces and gradually destroys the nuns, and a lot of the effects this film is celebrated for work to create this impression.
On the subject of colour, I also love how Sister Ruth is the one who brings the colour red bursting into Saint Faith’s: first, when she runs into the room covered in blood (perhaps significantly, the biggest stains are smeared over her breasts, exacerbating the other nuns’ embarrassment), and of course at the end with her red hair, dress and lipstick. What a wonderful moment when she accuses Clodagh of being jealous of her, and then looks down suggestively – Clodagh lowers her eyes, perhaps to look away from Ruth, perhaps to survey her beauty more fully. Either way, she’s visibly disturbed by what she sees or refuses to see. It’s one of those great moments you sometimes get in old films where a pause and an exchange of looks seem to convey something that can’t be spoken out loud. By the same token, it would be reductive to try and sum up the effect of this moment in words, but it’s fair to say that it reinforces the overall sense that this is a place with supernatural (or just terrifyingly
natural) powers, and that Sister Ruth becomes a conduit for those powers, forcing to the surface everything that has been repressed and controlled. At the end, she tries to hurl Sister Clodagh off the cliff, but ends up plunging into the abyss herself. In a symbolic sense, Ruth also ‘gives herself up’ to Mopu with that last, primal scream, and Clodagh’s survival signals her inability to do so: she can only look on in horror, and then run away.
Perhaps Ruth is even more in tune with her surroundings than the young general or Kanchi. The former enchants the latter with his ‘Black Narcissus’ perfume, saying that it is ‘rather common to smell of ourselves’; Ruth says she hates all scents. She later calls the general ‘Black Narcissus’, and when one of the nuns protests that ‘He’s not black’, she claims that ‘They all look alike to me’. This is overtly racist, of course, but it also suggests a perverse alignment between Sister Ruth, the Holy Man, the mountains and the wind, with Ruth coming to represent an almost indiscriminate destructive force, incapable of being controlled or repressed, and as morally blank as the elements themselves in the face of the things and people she’s destroying. She rushes through the convent like a malevolent, wind-borne spirit, and ends up looking as though she is literally possessed and animated by some elemental (not Christian) demon.
According to the trivia page on IMDB, it was Kathleen Byron who insisted on playing Sister Ruth’s scene in Dean’s house as though she was happy and relieved to be there: Michael Powell wanted her to dart around crazily, and almost fell out with Byron because of her resistance to this idea. I like the humanity Byron brings to her part, and in some ways wish the film contained more of this, but perhaps Powell’s version would have got the point across better, showing how this attempted seduction was not the last gasp of Ruth’s civilised, human self, but instead the penultimate stage of her metaphorical ‘possession’.
Another powerful image that suggests the hopelessness of the nuns’ enterprise is the one that shows Sister Philippa trying to plant potatoes in the foreground of the shot, while the vast Himalayas stretch out behind her. A shot like that might, in a different context, have suggested a kind of heroic dignity to her struggle to cultivate the land, but here the mountains towering over Philippa make her vegetable patch seem like a comically misguided attempt to master and cultivate something infinite and mysterious – she might as well be planting vegetables in space. It comes as no surprise later on when we see Sister Philippa so transfixed by the mountains that she doesn’t notice the bell ringing, or when we find out that she’s been planting flowers (unashamedly transient, fragile and useless) instead of vegetables.
Drucker wrote:The one who plants the flowers then insists she needs external discipline in order to recover. But why did Sister Clodagh not notice until a garden had already blossomed that the "wrong" things had been planted there? She too, is distracted, and has lost order. What has won out? The natural order of the village.
Yes, it’s telling that Sister Clodagh interrupts her own prayer to ask Sister Philippa why she isn’t praying. I love the moment that follows, when Clodagh says they must work to drive away all distracting thoughts, and Philippa responds by simply turning up her horribly blistered palms. The more she works, the more she realises the futility of her work, and the closer she comes to being like the Holy Man, staring helplessly out at the mountains, squinting into the elements that are wearing her down.
djproject wrote:In a nutshell, I've seen this film as an object lesson on *bad* reasons to join a monastic order. The most bad reason is "running away from one's problems". The problems never go away - and are certainly not merely "left at the door" - when one takes up a monastic calling. On the contrary, it can come back full force and sometimes with a strong vengeance (Sister Ruth anyone?). This is not to say one should be "purged" of such difficulties but just know that it's not taking monastic vows that will do it. The purging comes from a dedicated, persistent, and, most importantly, a concentrated effort to make internal reconciliation. After all, you don't put newspapers on top of the crap-pile (or to use another completely different film, a paper that says "BROKEN GLASS" over, well, broken glass =] ).
The other takeaway is that the line between the sacred and the profane is sometime a fine one. This does not mean all things are good or I am advocating for a pantheistic view of the world. But sometimes what we think is holy is perhaps not holy and what is not holy ends up being the best thing for us. I'm not saying one who should show up inebriated during Christmas services, but I would take a sincere song over a hypocritical one.
This raises an interesting and complex issue about the role of religion in this film. In some ways, the film suggests that these nuns are not really the good Christians they claim to be. Mr Dean has a point when he attacks Sister Clodagh’s supercilious, elitist way of talking about Christ, and it’s disturbingly clear that one of the main reasons for Sister Ruth’s breakdown is the uncharitable treatment she’s received from Sister Clodagh, who for all her apparent concern (and for all of Ruth’s obvious problems) is evidently projecting her own issues onto Ruth, and punishing her for them. So to some extent, it feels like the nuns fail because they’re not fully invested in what they’re doing, are too wrapped up in their own personal problems, and are following the letter rather than the spirit of their order.
But more than this, and perhaps in tension with this, the film also seems to be saying that Christianity itself is out of place in this context, and perhaps that the limitations of the belief system – rather than just those of a few of its followers – are exposed here. When Sister Clodagh looks despairingly at the Holy Man and says that she ‘really doesn’t know what to do’ about him, Mr Dean says in a withering tone, ‘What would Christ have done?’ At first glance, you might think that he’s challenging her to be a better Christian, but the way the moment is played suggests that he is actually making an ironic comment about the irrelevance of Christian ideals in the face of this Holy Man and what he represents.
There’s an equally complex moment at the end – one of my favourites in the film – when Sister Philippa places some flowers (presumably the ones she grew instead of vegetables) in front of the crucifix, and looks sadly up at the figure of Christ. We see the crucifix from behind, towering over her, an impassive block of wood that seems to offer nothing in the way of mercy or redemption to this poor woman – played so beautifully by Flora Robson – as she tries to placate it. What is she saying with these flowers? That this was the best she could do, and that she hopes it’s enough for God? Or that the task God set her in this place was impossible, and she shouldn’t be blamed for failing to complete it? Do the flowers now signify something that distances her from God, rather than bringing her closer to him? She’s apologising to God, rebuking him for his cruelty, and coming to terms with her own (perhaps partial) loss of faith, all at the same moment.
This can be a rather cold, witheringly ironic film at times, but the scenes focusing on Sister Philippa are genuinely poignant, and they foreground questions about whether the God these nuns serve really exists at this altitude, or at least whether he is of any use to them there. Everything is left ambiguous, of course. From what I know of Rumer Godden, it sounds like she was a fairly devout Christian, and a Catholic convert in later life, so I don’t know how far the film diverges from the novel in this respect. But unlike
Ordet, the film we almost discussed for this round (and the one I voted for),
Black Narcissus doesn’t seem to have much faith in God: he seems to be eclipsed by other, less explicable and less benign forces, and the film even seems to be quite happy about that.
(Six down - sorry I can't work out how to link to the exact post.)