A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Under the Sun of Satan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Under the Sun of Satan. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

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