“Satan is always ready to seduce us by pleasing the lust—ahahahaha!” taunts a nun in one of the notorious anti-religious movies. In a muted first week at the Cannes Film Festival, when Hollywood chose not to show any big movies and the original competition selection ranged from austere to demure, the hottest ticket on the Croisette was a blasphemous film that first hit theaters 55 years ago. And its haunting images of brutal, self-absorbed nuns watching as power-drunk priests tragically interrogate their victims with the pleasures of the torture chamber are as powerful as ever. Get ready for torture chamber tongue piercings, ankle piercings and a hot human pussy used as a dildo.
The DevilsBritish filmmaker Ken Russell’s sweeping critique of rampant church and state corruption that its first 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. The late director’s maudit will be the first title for Warner Bros.’ newly formed exclusive label. Clockwork, which will oversee its worldwide release this October.
The period film, which began in France in the 17th century, received one screening in Cannes so eagerly awaited that Oscar winners Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón (in the city where they will start the festival) almost changed their travel plans to continue. Peter Jackson, the newly minted recipient of the prestigious Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony, made sure he was there, in the hall where most of the attendees raised their hands when asked who was watching the film for the first time.
Starring the husky, hunky Oliver Reed as the louche Father Urbain Grandier and the randy Vanessa Redgrave as the convent Abbess, the insane Sister Jeanne des Anges, The Devils based in part on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 biography Demons of Loudun. That book recounts the remarkable demonic possession of a plague-ridden small town in 1634 after the defeat of the Protestants during the Huguenot Rebellion, which Russell clearly rewrote with righteous indignation. “The birth of a new France, where church and state are one,” says Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) to King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), just before they use their unstoppable power to cripple the proud Grandier and his resistance to their consolidation of control in Loudun.
Grandier plants the seeds of his own destruction when he impregnates the young in a series of nuns’ lovers, this one a daughter from a powerful and well-connected family with a vengeful priest among his relatives. When the family’s shame collided with Richelieu’s political plan, they pushed Satan’s charges to control the monks, all because of a supposedly unholy deal Grantier allegedly made with the devil.
Sister Jeanne, already suffering from Grandier’s passion, is easily driven into temporary insanity after the rape, and her fellow nuns quickly follow her in the delusions of physical torture. One of the most controversial scenes of the film, which has long been absent from the distributed literature, involves hungry naked sisters brutally breaking a statue of Christ crucified: licking his groin, grinding his butt and riding his face, while, in the distance, a masturbating priest shows blue watches or masturbates.
Grandier initially exposes the perversion of the church’s principles, even contemptuously insisting that, in Hell, “he will walk the living path of damned dogs.” But his once passionate embrace of “power, politics, wealth and women” has left him longing to accept God for his love for a chaste woman outside the church—at that time. The Devils it ultimately turns to tragedy when the now-repentant Grandier faces the inevitable corruption of the institution that inevitably leads to his downfall.
Presenting the Cannes premiere was historian Mark Kermode, who explained how he and Russell hunted down all the deleted footage while making a 2004 documentary about the film and decided to recreate the director’s original version in a pre-HD format called digibeta, a standard-definition magnetic videotape—the source of the lo-res bootleg that has made the file upload service illegal ever since. But now, 22 years later, the principals at Clockwork were able to make Warner Bros. The Devils for the next generation and the ultimate home video release.
Ken always said, ‘This is my most important political film—really, my last—'” Kermode said. “He thought it was a film about brainwashing, he thought it was a film about the corruption of religion, and the unholy marriage of church and state, which is a topic that is even more important now than it was when Ken prophetically did it in 1971. For this old film to look so modern and this conflict is extraordinary.”
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