23rd
Léon Morin, prêtre (1961)
Big-time machismo directors always shoot one “girl’s movie” - a picture with a lady in the lead, ostensibly about women’s experience of the world. It’s some kind of right of passage. I understand the urge to make these, but god I wish they wouldn’t. Sometimes the pictures touch down fine, like Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but more often they land strange and sick from radiation, like Altman’s 3 Women. Maybe the impulse to “make a movie just fer da ladies” is a prideful one – proving the young auteur’s powers to himself – more likely it’s just normal Hollywood politics. Directors’ agents like to add at least one pink entry onto their virile charges’ resumes – it makes talks with the studios easier, and convinces wonderful, gift-from-God writers the director is “serious” – and more power to them. Agents gotta agent. But damn if these movies, when they’re bad, aren’t like watching a chimp scuba dive. Male directors, mostly, just don’t know what to do when forced to treat the camera as mechanism of Woman’s Gaze and not Man’s; they dress their normal obsessions (sexual fixation; occupational power plays) up in lace and call it “a woman’s own picture,” as though merely including lady-voice narration transformed film into the realm of female empowerment. It takes a little more than that, Herr Direktor. Most cases, it seems to take a female writing partner (and producer, and camerawoman, and hell, why not replace the director too?). If none of those are available, the best thing a director/writer/author of cinema can do is just shut up, and let the actresses move and talk for themselves. The worst possible thing (the one Jean-Pierre Melville does here) is to feed the actresses reams of male authored dialog to stumble through while the creative men beam and bask in their own goofy off-stage glory. Telling a woman what to think – and making her read it, syllable by syllable – is no way to make an authentic woman’s movie. If your film relies on the illusion that “women are finally speaking for themselves,” this strategy is going to give you some baggage to deal with.
Leon Morin, Priest, Melville’s feminist film that failed, is no different than most entries in the dudes-directing-ladies genre. Set in Vichy France, it tells the story of a town where all the men – save the men of cloth – have gone off to die in the resistance. The girls that remain fall variously in love with each other, the too-good-looking-to-be-credible priest, and God. It’s an interesting set up and Melville seems to know it: his formal rigors are so lax here he doesn’t bother to fix jerk-slip editing, unconvincing staging, and overly literal narration. The film plays like it was made over a series of holiday weekends as a lark. Perhaps it was. But the technical sloppiness of the picture is not a death-or-glory issue; untidier films have been made, and they’ve still managed to work. The issue that kills it is: it’s condescending. Under the guise of a compassionate embrace of womanhood the film tells a typical male fantasy. The priest is strong, unbending, wise, and gracious; the women are pitiful, irrational, lost, and desperate. This is a man’s movie, despite Emmanuelle Riva’s wall to wall narration, and the filmmaker’s meek insistence that “she’s speaking for herself” should be handled dubiously. The picture isn’t about one woman’s obsession with Leron Morin, it’s about Morin’s casual ability to bag any parishioner he chooses. Jean-Paul Belmondo, said Morin, struts without effort through his scenes. A meeker lead actor, perhaps, would have given the film more balance, but even a limp-wristed priest would not have erased Melville’s shoddy “speak for them before they speak for themselves” approach to his female characters.
Let’s take a step back from the aggressive character stabs and acknowledge: this film plays well with a modern audience. At Film Forum, the only people going to see Melville pictures on a Tuesday night are pretty “with it;” they know that Melville is hot right now. And hot directors, especially hot, dead, New Wave directors, get a wide latitude from the audiences that seek them out. The elements of this film that would have crucified it in front of its contemporary audience – or a modern audience not primed to cut Jean-Pierre slack for every cinematic misdemeanor – play like a series of raucous in-jokes today. When Riva narrates that she “desperately wants to bed Father Morin,” Melville cuts to an actual shot of her bed. There’s a place for shamelessly literal narration. Sometimes (The Assassination of Jesse James) it heightens the literary qualities of a film, forcing a collusion between narration and image long discouraged by Malick-ian imitators. But used as it is here, the narration is just laughable. Melville seems to imply, with his bed edit and with others, that the minds of women – their desires, their velocities – are so opaque, that we (the men; the rational, thinking men) need all the help we can get in understanding the muddled, misbegotten brains o’ Woman. At the screening I saw, I was surprised to hear no snorts from the crowd; there had to have been at least one attentive feminist in attendance.
A few pittance points for Melville: he was daring. It can’t have been common in 1961 for an actress to look upon a stern, dominatrix lady-boss and whisper “I am in love with her” as Riva does twice here (her skirt chasing ends when Belmondo’s frock sashays into her life). But Melville’s taboo busting is little more than petty three-ring showmanship. He’s skilled at grabbing our attention by treading outside the straight-and-narrow, but he doesn’t do much with it once it’s his. He deploys non-traditional female sexuality in Leon the way modern directors deploy violence today: as quick shocks to distract from a total lack of wit. After hinting that women can be happy without men, he wheels out Belmondo and lets the teasing lesbianism remain just that: a tease.
Leon Morin, Priest is, perhaps, a fine film with a fine message: the needs of God and the needs of the flesh do not mix. But today at least, thinking back on the film’s shameless self-satisfaction (Melville: “we told a woman’s tale”) I can’t give it a pass. Melville knew gangsters, and granite-headed Zen posturing. Army of Shadows, The Samurai, and The Red Circle are all fine, empty-skulled thrillers. He should have stuck with those, and let the girls of Leon Morin alone. Maybe without the too-tough director looking over their shoulders, they would have forgotten about the simp priest and gone where they really wanted to go: into each others’ beds. Until they remake it for eighty million in South Beach, we’ll never know.
