Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse

Anna Karina as a Bride of Christ in Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse

        

Jacques Rivette's Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse is an adaptation of Denis Diderot's novel with Anna Karina as the titular nun. The French title is more apt than the American release one (The Nun) because Suzanne is a reluctant and rebellious member of the cloister. She continually pits herself against hierarchy and must experience hardship, but her will is never broken.

Rivette gives us Karina as the visual focus of his spartan spectacle. Her fellow nuns are cogs in an oppressive societal machine with Suzanne as the voice of enlightenment within that false order. The nuns are seen as a mindless hive, none more so than when attending to Suzanne so that she can be a beatific Bride of Christ or when spitting at her when she renounces her baptism. As Jim Hoberman has noted, Rivette contrasts sumptuous color photography with austerity of camera movement. Suzanne's convents might as well be prisons in Rivette's constricted grid.

The specter of 60's radicalism and rebellion lurks below the surface of this film. God, what a corrective correlative it is to such philosophical marshmallows as The Nun's Story. The luridness of the plot throws in relief Rivette's restraint with his material. I generally prefer Rivette when he is less restrained, as in Out 1 and Celine and Julie..., than in a work like La Belle Noiseuse where his restraint congeals into autumnal fussiness. Happily, Rivette was beginning to lose his shit in Suzanne. The penultimate act of the film finds Suzanne switching from one convent to another, an austere cage for a gilded one. Novitiate bootcamp turns into a lesbian sewing circle, but Suzanne will not drink the group think Kool-Aid. The decadence of Suzanne's second convent ripens the film visually. The Mother Superior is a sapphic coquette festooned with jewelry. Her thwarted seduction of Suzanne in a garden has an open air beauty worth of Fragonard. Yet, even that fleeting glimpse of eroticism is framed within the confines of the confessional. 

Suzanne is eventually sprung from her second convent, but cannot fare any better in the outside world. She falls by the wayside into prostitution and, unable to live that life, defenestrates herself. Rivette has originally adapted the novel for the stage and traces of that production can be gleaned in the proscenium framing of the interior sequences. The three knocks at the beginning are also a nod to the theater. Karina emphasized in interviews the precision and meticulousness Rivette demanded from his performers. Yet, that doesn't always extend to Rivette's filmic techniques and strategies.

The film is full of odd little squiggles, jump cuts, discordant transitional music and other touches of authorial imprint that jolt the film out of any period piece wax museum trap. What impresses me about the film is its tonal variety, multilayered texture and breadth of social vision. It reflects the tumult and deterioration of monarchial France that would culminate in revolution, the spirit of which would make a fleeting return to France soon after the film's premiere.