Avis des critiques

The scandal, which has formed the foundation of The Nun’s cinematic legacy, has arguably overshadowed the serious work that Rivette set out to achieve in the film: an exploration of the insidious and sanctioned abuse entrenched within the structures of the church, along with the institution’s cruel subjugation of female agency.

["The Nun"] might be one of the greatest prison movies ever made and certainly one of the most controversial... [It has] been regarded by some as an early, minor aberration in his remarkable oeuvre. But there is nothing minor about this movie, and nothing particularly aberrant: In its sculptural compositions and meticulous choreography of bodies through space, it has a recognizably Rivettian formal beauty.

“The Nun” defies its reputation; I remembered it as being austere to the point of desiccation, lacking the playfulness for which Rivette is usually revered, but, seen anew, it writhes with almost uncontainable surges of anger, lust, and distress.

Even in this crowd [at the 1968 New York Film Festival], “La Religieuse” stood out, less for its notoriety than its brilliant filmmaking and impassioned restraint.

Even the lack of subtlety in aspects of Rivette’s aesthetic... has a purpose, as the film is peppered with Brechtian touches that call attention to themselves as formal techniques. Just as we become engaged with the melodrama of Simonin’s dilemma, we’re jolted out of our credulity with a jump or smash cut, or a snippet of noise from the sparse, modern score. Such moments remind us that, while the story is set in the baroque past, it’s told with an eye toward the modernist present, when the individual is still under siege by the disciplinary control of societal institutions.

A reflection of Karina’s ability to endure, The Nun’s brilliance comparably shines through even after all these years later of suppression.

Visually uninteresting, with a 'bars' motif that's so redundant as to become irritating, [the film] is further handicapped by Karina's depthless, unaffecting portrayal. The French censors banned the film for over a year, thus generating both notoriety and goodwill, neither justified.

The ordeal of a pure young woman, as Rivette conceives it, has an eerie theatricality and mystery, as it dramatises the nature of freedom. It is part melodrama, part erotic memoir... Perhaps it hasn’t aged quite as well as the rest of Rivette’s work, but it is still a deeply, almost unreadably strange story.

Where some of Rivette’s mid-career masterworks like Céline and Julie Go Boating and Out 1 are radical and meandering, The Nun is rigid, curt and fiercely focused... [and offers] a fine showcase for Karina, who loses herself in the central role of a woman desperate for reasons to stay alive.

Piercing sounds of church bells drown out several passages within the film. The ringing — purposefully captured at an uncomfortably loud octave — encompasses our ears. The dialogue may be lost in the process, but the impact is heightened. The sound design of La Religieuse contributes strongly in empathizing with Suzanne, as it clearly translates her anxiety and loneliness.

"The Nun" is a mess—a garish potboiler first and a harsh critique of religious institutions last. But it is never less than involving and is anchored by Anna Karina’s simmer-to-boil-and-back-again lead performance... [while] Rivette and cinematographer Alain Levent masterfully visualize her journey as a series of static, psychologically charged tableaux.

To understand what the film is doing, I think one has to see it as a dialectic–between classicism and modernism, past and present, outside and inside, freedom and confinement, decoupage (a relatively predetermined, rigidified form) and mise en scene (a relatively dynamic, variable form).