Sous le soleil de Satan, 1987
[Under the Sun of Satan]
Under the Sun of Satan opens
to an inherently solemn ritual as a senior priest, Canon Menou-Segrais
(Mauric Pialat) shaves a spot on the top of the head of a pensive
young priest named Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) who, in turn,
uses the occasion to express his feelings of profound estrangement
and inutility from the practical concerns of their congregation.
Acknowledging both his mediocre scholastic aptitude at the seminary
that nearly prevented him from becoming ordained, and his indebtedness
to Menou-Segrais for his admission into the parish ministry (despite
the young priest's perceivable disapproval of his superior's spiritual
resignation and complacency), Donissan nevertheless declares his
intention to request the archbishop for a re-assignment, preferably
to a Trappist monastery where he believes that his temperament and
secular detachment would be more conducive to their contemplative,
monastic life of humble (and seemingly unobtrusive) service. The
film then contrasts Donissan's acts of asceticism and mortification
against the actions of a promiscuous and amoral teenager named Mouchette
(Sandrine Bonnaire) who leaves home and unexpectedly appears at the
chateau of her older, financially insolvent aristocratic lover, Marquis
de Cadignan (Alain Artur) after an altercation with her parents over
news of her pregnancy. Unwilling to entertain Mouchette's capricious
idea of running away to Paris, but unable to send the inconvenient
young woman away despite her provocative admission of having another
lover - a married deputy minister named Dr. Gallet (Yann Dedet) -
Cadignan allows her to stay at his home and, during the course of
their brief cohabitation, is fatally shot. Meanwhile, Menou-Segrais
dispatches Donissan to the neighboring town of Etaples in order to
assist a retiring priest during confession. Preferring to travel
on foot, Donissan traverses the disorienting rural landscape throughout
the day only to realize as darkness falls that he is hopelessly lost.
In his exhaustion and delirium, he becomes aware of the presence
of Satan alongside him who appears in the guise of a traveling horse
dealer (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) and tests his faith by endowing him
with the ability to see unobstructedly into the human soul. Now possessing
the grace and burden of spiritual insight, the tormented Donissan
journeys home and fatedly encounters an instrument of mutual salvation
in the wanton and aimless Mouchette.
Adapted from Georges Bernanos'
first novel, Under Satan's Sun (who
modeled the protagonist after St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney,
the Curé d'Ars), Under the Sun of Satan is a stark, challenging,
and uncompromising exploration of faith, spiritual service, despair,
and redemption. Maurice Pialat visually juxtaposes the dark, austere,
and somber hues of Donissan's ecclesiastic environment with the warm,
naturalistic hues of village life to create a visual metaphor for
the dour young priest's self-imposed alienated existence: the chromatic
shift as Donissan begins his journey to Etaples and encounters a
group of children playing in the street; the textural earth tones
of the rolling rural landscape that contrasts against the imperceptible,
claustrophobic darkness of his fevered encounter with the enigmatic
horse dealer; the intimate, compositional framing of Mouchette in
soft and innately sensual amber hues as she visits Cadignan and Gallet
that becomes harsh, ashen, and pallid as Donnisan forcefully engages
her in a soul-baring self-evaluation of her troubled existence. However,
in contrast to the deeply religious Bernanos' predominant exploration
of the spiritual themes of God's silence, the sin of complacency,
and the immediacy of evil, Pialat focuses on the physical and tangible
manifestations of temptation, suffering, and despair on the individual
psyche. By capturing Donnisan and Mouchette's personal journeys toward
a reconciled awareness of their moral and spiritual imperfections,
Under the Sun of Satan emerges, not as
a portrait of transcendence, but as a tactile and provocative illustration
of the real, yet indefinable essence of the human soul.
© Acquarello 2003. All rights reserved.
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The
sound of a rattling, mechanical alarm bell seemingly ushers a silent wave
of anonymous, early morning commuters heading towards metropolitan Paris
at the crack of dawn as they follow the ritualistic procession of informal
queues leading to the subway station, pack into crowded, unconditioned trains,
transfer through a coordinated maze of mass transportation, traverse rain
soaked sidewalks and intersections, and navigate through high-traffic streets.
The chaotic montage culminates in a dizzying shot of the dispiriting visual
monotony of the impersonal cityscape from the window of a passing commuter
train. From the upstairs terrace window of an unidentified home, an off-screen
narrator (Jean-Loup Reynold) witnesses the fleeting sight a passing train
and begins to recount the familiar (and haunted) images of his youth in
the suburban town of Courbevoie. Once laid to ruins in the aftermath of
war, a new and insidiously consuming operation - the imperative of urban
assimilation - now devastates the architectural, social, and cultural landscape
of the working-class region as old buildings are demolished to make room
for new, high population density residential construction and popular sources
of low-cost communal entertainment, such as matinees at the local cinema,
become increasingly nonexistent, statistically relocating to the hypersaturated
venues of Paris. However, it is not only structures, but also people who
are increasingly displaced by rapid industrial expansion, as humanity becomes
valued through levels of productivity, and the elderly are relegated to
the role of inutile pensioners searching for inclusion and purpose in the
new modern society (in a wry shot of a group of elderly citizens passing
idle time by sitting on a park statue that ironically celebrates their role
as nurturers of the younger generation). Meanwhile, an idyllic shot of a
wooded park that continues to be deforested for high profit, real estate
speculation is contrasted against the subhuman conditions of migrant worker "apartments" in
a nearby shantytown (juxtaposed against of an advertising banner that boasts
of all rentals as including all modern conveniences) as residents evacuate
in the wake of a rapidly spreading fire. Inevitably, the figurative tale
of two cities emerges, as the image of postwar Paris becomes a complex portrait
of ambitious policy and human disaffection.
Maurice
Pialat creates an acerbic and unsentimental, yet hauntingly poetic and profoundly
engaging exposition on urbanization, alienation, reconstruction and cultural
transformation in