“Satan is always ready to tempt us with sensual pleasures – hahahahaha!” He mocks a horny nun in one of cinema’s most famous anti-religious scourges. In a muted first week at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hollywood chose not to debut any major films and the initial competition selections ranged from the stern to the staid, the hottest ticket at the Croisette was a blasphemous film that first opened in theaters 55 years ago. And his compelling images of hysterical nuns and orgies watching power-drunk priests gleefully interrogate their victims in a torture chamber remain as powerful as ever. Prepare to be tongue-pierced in a torture chamber, ankle-hammered, and burned-out human femur used as a dildo.
DevilsBritish director Ken Russell’s searing condemnation of rampant corruption in church and state so stark that its initial The late director’s film will be Warner Bros.’ initial title. The newly established niche, Clockwork, will be released globally next October.
This historical film, set in 17th-century France, only got one screening in Cannes, and was so highly anticipated that Oscar winners Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron (who are in town to kick off the festival) almost changed their travel plans to stay. Peter Jackson, the recent recipient of an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony, made sure to be there in a room where the majority of attendees raised their hands when asked who was watching the film for the first time.
Starring the hulking husky Oliver Reed as Father Urban Grandier, and Vanessa Redgrave as the abbess, the crazy, hunchbacked Sister Jeanne des Anges. Devils Partly based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 historical novel Loudoun Devils. This book recounts beguiling events of demonic possession in a small town in 1634 struck by plague after the defeat of the Protestants during the Huguenot rebellions, which Russell clearly recreates with righteous indignation. “A new France is born, where Church and State are one,” says Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), who is in cahoots with the happily defunct King Louis
Grandier sows the seeds of his own destruction when he bears the latest in a line of the convent’s lovers, a daughter from a powerful and well-connected family with a vengeful priest among her relatives. When the family’s disgrace coincides with Richelieu’s political agenda, they concoct accusations of demonic 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-fueled exorcism, and her fellow nuns soon follow her into delusions of physical torment. One of the film’s most controversial scenes, long absent from circulating print, involves the sex-starved naked sisters vigorously violating a larger-than-life statue of a crucified Christ: licking his thigh, grinding on his genitals and riding his face, while, from a distance, a blue-balled priest watches and furiously masturbates to the show’s orgy.
Grandier initially sums up the hierarchical perversions of the Church, even cheekily insisting that in hell he will “walk on a living pavement of aborted scoundrels.” But his impassioned embrace of “power, politics, wealth, and women” made him yearn to embrace God through his love for a pure woman outside the church—at which point Devils It ultimately turns into a tragedy in which the repentant Grandier now faces unstoppable institutional corruption that inevitably leads to his downfall.
Giving the premiere at Cannes was historian Mark Kermode, who explained how he and Russell had actually found all the deleted material while making a 2004 documentary about that film, and set out to reconstruct the director’s original cut on a pre-high-definition format called digibeta, which was standard-definition magnetic videotape—a low-resolution bootleg source that has since spread on illegal file-sharing services. But now, 22 years later, Clockwork executives have been able to convince Warner Bros. Open their safes and let them recover Devils for posterity and eventual home video release.
“Ken always said, ‘This is my most, and only, political film,'” Kermode said. “He thought it was a movie about brainwashing, and he thought it was a movie about the corruption of religion, and the unholy marriage between church and state, which is a much more relevant topic now than it was when Caine made it so prophetically in 1971. For a movie that’s this fresh and this confronting, it’s extraordinary.”
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