Jacques Rivette
1966
140 minutes
This is a fairly long and boring film about a nun who doesn't want to be a nun. It was directed by Jacques Rivette, for whom long and boring is pretty much his brand. It stars the gorgeous Anna Karina, who spends most of it miserable and in modest clothing. It was quite shocking back in 1966 and was condemned by the Catholic church and banned for awhile, but the shock value has faded quite a bit. The story of the ban is probably more interesting these days than the film itself, as is often the story with such bans and hysteria.
The story is pretty miserable throughout. A girl gets sent off to the nunnery but refuses at the last minute to take her vows, to the horror of her family. As it turns out, the girl was sent to the nunnery because she's the product of an extra-marital affair, which makes the mother feel guilty and unhappy, and additionally the family can't afford to marry her off. They eventually coerce her into joining a rather terrible nunnery, where she is horribly abused. She petitions the court and eventually gets sent to a more "fun" nunnery, where the head nun makes sexy advances toward her that she's doesn't really pick up on. She ends up in a semi-romantic relationship with a monk who shares her situation of involuntary monk-itude. They flee together but end up separating when he gets too aggressive with her. He gets caught and faces life in prison for fleeing his vows, which would also be her fate if she were caught. Out of options, she ends up seeking employment at a place that ends up being a brothel, and then she kills herself by jumping out a window when she realizes what that her new life would entail. The end.
All in all, it's a pretty gruesome look at what nuns once faced, based on a 1792 novel. That novel got adapted a couple more times. One is a 2013 French film which condenses the story down to a bit more tolerable 100 minutes and with Isabelle Huppert thrown in to boot. You have not seen this and you probably are unlikely to seek it out. It was also made into a 1986 nunsploitation film called Convent of Sinners, by the same director as Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust, the latter which you watched during the pandemic as part of programming that was an offshoot of the monthly bad movie night you regularly attend.
Porno Holocaust was a hardcore sexploitation horror film that, fortunately, had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The plot involved a group of scientists going to an island overrun by mutated monsters, including one that's a mutated man with an enormous prosthetic dong. The film includes an unappealing amount of sweaty, hairy, early 1980s hardcore porn-sex with dongs (or at least fake ones) going in. It stars George Eastman--yes, the same guy who played a heavy in multiple spaghetti westerns and was also The Minotaur in Fellini's Satyricon.
You have a special fondness for George Eastman as the Minotaur because it reminds you of your cats. One afternoon when you lived in New Mexico when your younger cat was still a kitten, she and your older, much larger cat had an epic battle which you filmed. It went on for several minutes. The kitten had a lot of energy, but the fight was entirely dominated by the larger, older cat, who at several points just knocked her down and sat on her. You ended up taking this footage and editing in the sounds and dialogue from the Minotaur fight in Satyricon, which includes atmospheric winds, a lot of weird chanting from the spectators, cheesy fight sound effects, and eventually the protagonist pleading for his life with the Minotaur at the end. You uploaded this to Youtube as Fellini's Catyricon, where it lives to this day. (The Minotaur in the film ultimately spares the protagonist for his bravery and declares that day marks the beginning of a new friendship, which is roughly the course that your cats took after that fight as well...)
Time to choose something different: