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The Devils (1971) is the story of a man so fine that it threatens to destabilise society. Priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) is the leader of the fortified town of Loudon, straddling battlements and deploying the mesmeric powers of his moustache against those who question him. After seducing the daughter of a man of influence, he unrepentantly casts her off when she discovers she is pregnant (‘We laughed as we roused the animal. And now... it's devoured us.’) This proves to be a miscalculation, as it gathers a conspiracy of those who would like to see the end of Grandier. Meanwhile, the priest hangs up in his wild years after meeting Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones) and engages in a committed marriage, of sorts. Grandier’s persecution then begins, with the key witness Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), accusing him of using the devil to possess an entire nunnery. Before long, depravity rules, with the trial offering ample opportunity for ‘purgation’ by way of indulgence. Nuns run riot, enemas are dispensed, the walls of the city are ransacked and Grandier is broken. Appropriately, he is consigned to lusty flames, with Sister Jeanne tossed his profoundly phallic femur bone as consolation.
So far in this series of films about provocation, we’ve looked at films that prickle the average liberal art house film goer, films that are only provocative if we let them be and films that remind us we’re kind of sick for wanting to watch them. The Devils – while not its sole raison d’etre – is unashamedly provocative and fights the war on good taste on multiple fronts (sex, religion, death violence). Although never outright banned, it’s very easy to see why Russell’s film raised the hackles of censors. Why show one nun naked when you can show fifty? Why show fifty nuns naked when you can show them rutting on a statue of Jesus as well? And why not shoot that with cacophonous organ music and dizzying zooms in and out? Russell is not interested in making a delicate meal and there is an admirable honesty in that. Fittingly for the setting, The Devils sits besides Chaucer and Bosch for all out assault, a twelve course meal for the senses. Taking everything and the kitchen sink and tossing in a stuffed crocodile for good measure, The Devils is a film about hysteria and it embodies that state of mind, both in its pleasures and its pains. Constantly threatening to derail itself into silliness (there’s more than a few straight-faced scenes that have the whiff of Monty Python about them), it nonetheless justifies its extremities both through historical fact and through the novelty of its enquiry.
The iconography of the film may be religious but its subject is sex, specifically the power of sex to disrupt social order. Of course, multiplying those factors of controversy was always going to be two hands firmly grasped on the third rail, especially in 1971, especially in Ken Russell’s rabidly explicit manner. One of Russell’s major additions to its source material is setting it during a plague outbreak (making it grimly appropriate quarantine viewing). As established in academic research and by browsing your Twitter timeline for half a second, the immanent presence of death has a powerful effect on libido. Oliver Reed, freighting both the ‘hot priest’ forbidden fruit and the sex shaman charisma of a Rolling Stone, makes him ‘a man well worth going to Hell for’, worth looking for the final affirmation of life before shuffling off this mortal coil.
While the majority of flesh on screen is (depressingly inevitably) female, this is the rare film where a man is the explicit object of lust. Film stars are almost always implicitly lust objects (except when they’re pulling a Funny Face and playing on their ability to hide their light), but it’s rare that this bubbles up beyond subtext, especially about a man. On first watch, it was a revelation to me to see Reed, a man I remembered only in end stage dissolution or via outlandish talk show appearances, justify his place as the gravitational centre of this vortex of lust. Like knowing Orson Welles only through Paul Masson commercials and then catching Citizen Kane, it was a singular experience. Of course, Reed needs to be devastatingly attractive: he’s an unrepentant fuckboi, and only with liberal application of sex appeal does it feel justifable for women to knowingly crash themselves against the rocks of society’s mores to lie among his voluminous chest hair. Although Grandier leaves at least three women in the lurch, he is not repentant or unresolved about his desires, and the film stands with him. On the stand, facing capital punishment, he states his position: ‘I have been a man. I have enjoyed women. I have enjoyed power.’ The modern softboi post-factum justifies his philandering with arguments against monogamy as an outmoded tool of heteropatriarchal conditioning. Similarly, Grandier’s sophistry lets him justify living the priestly life while also enjoying the sins of the flesh. His common-law wife questions his thinking: ‘St Paul says that he who marries does a good thing, but he who remains chaste does something better.’ He flits out of the yoke, responding, ‘Then I am content merely to do a good thing and leave the best to those that can face it.’
Very few works of art during the Swinging Sixties dared speak the whispered truth behind the moral outrage of Beatlemania, the most dangerous revelation of all: girls are horny too. Women in film of the period are often disempowered victims of men’s sexual rampages (Alfie, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top); when they are centred, the story usually focuses on the hefty costs of indulging in sex, rather than why anyone would want to partake (Poor Cow, A Taste of Honey, The L-Shaped Room). By centring on a man, Russell had the licence to portray someone who could own their sexuality without being coy or oblivious, not a winking temptation nor a femme fatale.
As they lust after him, it also gives women’s sexuality space to be firm and actualised rather than recessed. Russell is forward-thinking in acknowledging that the nunnery was less a calling and more of a repository for ‘superfluous’ women that patriarchy has no use for (‘Most of the nuns here are noble women who have embraced the monastic life because there was not enough money at home to provide them with dowries. Or they were unmarriageable because ugly, a burden to the family. Communities which ought to be furnaces where souls are forever on fire with the love of God are merely dead with the grey ashes of convenience.’) Yet the film is sadly of its time when it comes to the options open to women when expressing that sexual liberation: either pregnant (like Grandier’s first on screen conquest), warped by unfulfilled yearning (Redgrave’s hunchbacked nun Jeanne, a decidedly ableist portrait of a woman literally twisted by sexual frustration) or an outcast. Gemma Jones’s Madeleine ends the film picking her way out of the ruins of Loudon, like Milton’s Adam and Eve, taking ‘wandering steps and slow’ towards a likely brutal future. The message of the film is not that sex is dangerous in itself; its message is that lust is far more dangerous repressed; as Oscar Wilde put it ‘the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.’ That freedom is not handed equally to all though. While Grandier is brutally tortured and slaughtered, we sense his crime is not merely lust, but gross overindulgence. Women, by contrast, are damned by the merest infraction.
Russell, as in all his work, is drawn to those who steal fire from the gods, especially if he can show them doomed to have their organs eternally pecked. Everyone in the film is driven by sex: the prosecutors by their meretricious attempts to expunge it (which also allow them to be in prurient proximity to it), the nuns in sublimating it, the patriarchs and doctors in trying to brutally control it. Only Grandier dares to take what others dance around. Sex and pain are intimately linked, an intertwining that is sublimated at the heart of Christianity, from Jesus himself to Julian of Norwich. In one brilliant scene, a succession of busts in Grandier’s chambers are destroyed by guards, a chilling threat on his body that also connects Grandier’s sufferings with those of Jesus. Likewise, Russell is the artist who enjoys the chafe of artistic suffering, aware that given total licence he would have nothing to kick against and create work about. He’s undoubtedly a knowing provocateur, a very naughty boy, but there are moments when he’s also the messiah.
Recommendations
I listened to Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die (free to stream here) while doing a jigsaw and a deep contentment settled upon me (I looked up from the pieces to watch the impromptu climactic dance sequence). Read a bit more on this very consoling work about the inevitability of pain.
She Found It At the Movies, a great essay collection about female desire and the movies, edited by Christina Newland, which has a good essay by Eloise Ross (‘What Does It Mean to Desire an Onscreen Abuser?’) that delves more deeply into Oliver Reed in Oliver!
Sam Ashby’s hibernating magazine Little Joe has a good article on Derek Jarman’s contribution to the set design for The Devils.
The online edition of Kino Klassika is sharing a new restoration of Yuri Norstein’s utterly charming tale Hedgehog in the Mist for free. Ten minutes long, beautifully animated and ready for any child in your life who has seen My Neighbour Totoro too many times.
MUBI have Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Woman in Chains (La Prisonnière) available for the next few weeks. A good companion to Blow-Up with the same mix of philosophy, murder mystery and modish ‘60s art. Add in a dash of Peeping Tom and Clouzot’s fine hand with suspense, and you’ve got the makings of a very good evening in.
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