The Nun (1966, Jacques Rivette) (Patreon)

61/100

Basically a prison movie with habits. Suzanne enters the convent more or less against her will, as someone might take the rap for another's sake; lives in a cell (that's the actual word used, at least in the English subtitles) that gets searched for contraband at one point; spends time in an equivalent of "the hole" as punishment for alleged transgressions; has regular meetings with a lawyer who seeks to have her released; and even winds up sorta being shanked (okay, just poked with a pin, but still). "The only thing missing here is nonconsensual sex," I seriously no kidding thought to myself about an hour in, without any foreknowledge of where the film would head shortly thereafter. First half, which focuses straightforwardly on Suzanne's torment, is a bit victim-y for my taste, with only Mme de Moni's kindness briefly suggesting a modicum of hope (cf. Andy Dufresne finding Red!). But that sadly short-lived relationship is succeeded by misery misery misery that's not made significantly less enervating by virtue of its unconventional milieu. (Walls are walls, uniforms are uniforms, discipline is discipline.) Once Suzanne is transferred, however, the film takes an almost surreal turn, with the supporting cast of dour sadists replaced by what looks suspiciously like the population of Castle Anthrax in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: scores of beautiful young women bursting with unashamed sensuality. This, too, becomes a nightmare for Suzanne, but of a much more dramatically rewarding kind, since she now has to fend off adoration rather than disapproval. (Likewise with the dude who finally helps her escape.) Ending's startlingly, despondently abrupt, and answers my recent question about whether a film prior to Davies' House of Mirth had employed the rhetorical device of stating time and place at the start and close, by way of emphasizing how little time has passed over the course of the protagonist's decline. Don't think I'd have ID'd this as Rivette's work had I somehow not known in advance—it boasts few of his subsequent preoccupations—but, to be fair, he's adapting a novel that started out as the 18th-century version of a catfishing scheme! Look it up.