“Satan is always ready to tempt us with sensual pleasures – ahahahahahaha!” sneers an excited nun in one of cinema’s most notoriously anti-religious films. In a quiet first week at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hollywood decided not to premiere any major films and the competition’s initial selections ranged from stiff to humble, the hottest ticket on the Croisette was for a blasphemous film that first hit theaters 55 years ago. And his arresting images of hysterical, orgastic nuns watching as power-drunk priests gleefully interrogate their victims in the torture chamber are as powerful as ever. Get ready for tongue piercing in the torture chamber, ankle snapping and a burnt human femur used as a dildo.
devilsBritish director Ken RussellThe star-studded denunciation of rampant corruption between church and state, so brazenly dangerous that its initial X-rated release was banned in some countries and censored in others, premiered this week in a completely uncut version beautifully restored in 4K from the original camera footage. Audition of the late director’s film will be the opening title of Warner Bros.’s newly formed specialty label. Clockwork, which will oversee its global release this October.
The period film, set in 17th-century France, received a single screening at Cannes that was as hotly anticipated as the Oscar winners Guillermo del Toro AND Alfonso Cuaron (in town to kick off the festival) almost changed their travel plans to stick around. Peter Jacksonthe newly minted recipient of an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony made sure to be there, in an auditorium where most attendees raised their hands when asked who was seeing the film for the first time.
Starring a husky, hunky Oliver Reed as shadow Father Urbain Grandier and a randy Vanessa Redgrave as the Abbess of the convent, Sister Jean des Azhes, the mad hunchback, devils based in part on Aldous Huxleythe 1952 historical narrative Devils of Loudun. That book recounts strange incidents of demonic invasion of small plague-stricken towns in 1634 following the defeat of the Protestants during the Huguenot rebellions, which Russell vividly recreates with righteous indignation. “The birth of a new France, where church and state are one,” says Cardinal Richelieu, who is agreeing.Christopher Logue) for a cheerfully decadent King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), right before they use their unlimited powers to cripple the proud Grandier and his resistance to consolidating control over Loudun.
Grandier sows the seeds of his own destruction when he impregnates the latest in a line of lovers at the monastery, this one a girl from a powerful and well-connected family with a vengeful priest among her relatives. When the family’s disgrace aligns with Richelieu’s political agenda, they add accusations of satanic control over the nuns, all because of an imagined unholy pact Grandier supposedly made with the devil.
Sister Jeanne, already suffering from a lustful obsession with Grandier, is easily driven into temporary madness after a rape-induced exorcism, and her nuns quickly follow her into delusions of bodily torment. One of the film’s most controversial scenes, long missing from circulating prints, involves sex-starved naked sisters aggressively raping a larger-than-life image of a crucified Christ: licking his groin, grinding his crotch and riding his face, while, from a distance, displaying a more naked or undressed watch in blue and silver.
Grandier first epitomizes the church’s hierarchical perversions, even brazenly insisting that, in Hell, he will “walk a living sidewalk of aborted bastards.” But his once-enthusiastic embrace of “power, politics, wealth and women” has left him eager to embrace God through his love for a chaste woman outside the church—at this point devils it eventually turns into a tragedy in which the now-repentant Grandier confronts the unstoppable institutional depravity that inevitably leads to his downfall.
Presenting the Cannes premiere was the historian Mark Kermodewho explained how he and Russell actually tracked down all the deleted material while making a 2004 documentary about the film and decided to reconstruct the original director’s cut in a pre-HD format called digibeta, a standard-definition magnetic videotape—the source of a lo-res bootleg that has since made the rounds on illegal file-sharing services. But now, 22 years later, the directors of Clockwork were able to get Warner Bros. to open their vaults and allow them to properly restore devils for posterity and eventual home video release.
“Ken always said, ‘This is my most political film, really, the only one,'” Kermode said. “He thought it was a brainwashing film, he thought it was a film about the corruption of religion and the unholy marriage of church and state, which is an even more relevant subject now than when Ken did it so prophetically in 1971. For a film this old to feel so modern and this confrontational is extraordinary.”
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