Director: Ken Russell
Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian
Have I Seen it Before: Nope!
Did I Like It: Seeing only bits of this in anticipation of its re-release this year, I’m not sure I’d have been all that motivated to see it. Knowing that it was a film that had been little seen since its original release in the 70s? That’s what got me to duck out of work early for one of the final matinee screenings at Circle.
And I’m apparently entering a period of going to the movies where I’m—at least in the beginning—not entirely sure what I’m seeing. Here, I’m also spending a good part of the middle not entirely sure what I’m seeing. And then there’s the ending, where things have only become somewhat more clear.
Visually, there’s a timeless quality on display. Other than the fact that evey woman in the film finds Oliver Reed’s 1970s bluster so attractive that lifetimes spent being positively terrified of God are thrown out in an instant in favor of a second act that reads more like nudie film that is very much of the era. The city of Loudon feels simultaneously ancient and brand new, even after it (spoilers) is quicky dispatched after the film’s climax. The interiors are never what one would suspect from the subject matters. This makes the color of the film stand out in sharp relief against the antiseptic brick in all directions.
The film has a number of things to say about corruption and religion, and its when it focuses on the prior that things are a great deal stronger than they might otherwise be. Urbain Grandier (Reed) is the kind of feckless hippocrite that the faithful will blame for the unraveling of their faith, and we the skeptical just cite as examples. It turns out, in the final reckoning with his own hypocrisy, he finally frees himself of the need to lie, while the rest of the clergy around him unravel and begin to self-destruct. He becomes a hero in his flaws, and must be destroyed. Had this not all descended into awkwardly staged orgies for the sake of awkwardly staged orgies, the tragedy of Grandier might have stuck with me far longer than I might have otherwise thought.