Review of the film “Leon Morin, Priest”.
Written by Dan McDonald
I recently watched a 1961 French
movie “Leon Morin, Priest” one of the movies within the acclaimed Criterion
Collection and I want simply in this post to give you enough information to
help you evaluate whether you would like to watch it for yourself.
Photo in Wikipedia article
The 1961 movie is a film adaptation
of a French novel “Leon Morin, Pretre” published in 1952. The novel was
published in translated form into English in 1953; in Britain as “Leon Morin,
Priest” and in the United States as “The Passionate Heart”. The story is set in
a city in Axis occupied Vichy France between 1940 and 1945.
The film’s central focus is on a
widow with a young child who goes into a church one day to give her confession.
She does not desire a religious experience, but has a desire to set forth her
atheism to a priest. She had been raised Catholic, but later in life married a
Jewish man, and became both an atheist and Communist. But now she lives
in Vichy France, her husband has died and her child is being raised outside of
town with hopes of keeping the child’s Jewish roots hidden from the Germans who
have influence in the town. The time in the confessional begins a dialogue and
friendship between her and the priest, Leon Morin.
While the movie is focused on the
relationship between this woman and the faithful if somewhat modernistic
priest, a larger community begins to be seen around them. This is what I found
so fascinating about the movie. After the war it was easy to see that the times
of living the sort of life that was lived in Vichy France was temporary and
even abnormal in the greater picture. But in the days while that era lasted it
was life as its residents knew it, and as far as they were concerned this was
the normal life that was their lives to live. You begin to see how the
residents living that life were impacted in different ways to try to adjust
their lives to the abnormal times that seemed to be permanent to those living
in them.
There were scenes of occupiers,
first some Italians who treated the occupation more as a tourist’s exploration;
and then the Germans whose occupation was more guided by the rigid principles
of German National Socialism (Nazism). I think the movie was intentionally
formed around the paradox of a way of life that seemed permanent even though it
was actually quite temporary. But those involved could do no other than treat
it as permanent. In such a situation there were those who questioned their
lives so transformed by the new realities of the occupation. There were those
seeking to rebel against the rebellion as patriots and saboteurs. There were
those who sought to make the best of a situation through collaborating with the
new powers.
The temporary nature of the
situation seemingly permanent to its residents also played out in other ways.
France had a shortage of males. War had created thousands of widows, trying to
adjust to a lack of men. The movie brings out the possible answers suggestively
and almost never explicitly. The characters are nuanced. There is hardly ever
any dualistic separation of heroes and villains. There is a consideration of
how drives moving towards good or ill are often mixed drives rather than pure
drives.
The movie seeks to lead us to contemplate the sort of passions
that drive us in the ways we live life. There are nationalistic, vocational,
sexual, psychological, and religious passions. The movie shows a real
conversion experience which can be viewed from the perspective of a life changed by sacramental grace, or less spiritually as if it is someone’s self-driven reorientation
towards a fresh start in life. The characters, whether religious, pragmatic,
patriot, or collaborator are not clichéd characters but realistic human beings seeking to live out their lives in a setting that seems permanent even if temporary. Ultimately
the movie seems to me a wonderful black and white film capturing without color;
the nervous fragile always yearning depths of the hues and colors of our humanity.
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