Recensioni de* critic*

Pialat’s willingness to go all the way in terms of stark symbolism... is surely what alienated his haters, but it’s also what makes his film so remarkable in its ornery, unrepentant way.

You don’t remember Satan as much for what happens in it as for the visual and thematic intensity with which it joins the holy, the horrific, and the utterly mundane, and for how palpably it externalizes Donissan’s anguish, without the actor or the movie overdoing it.

Like its zealous protagonist, Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan is at once austere and jittery with nerves... [It's now] easier than ever to appreciate as one of its director's, and star's, best films.

Highlights of this intense, challenging film including a murder, an encounter with Satan, and a volatile performance by Pialat's extraordinary discovery, Sandrine Bonnaire.

[Pialat's] adaptation was one of violence toward the text, scrapping swathes of plot and removing temporal elements, speeding up the book, multiplying the confrontations. Retaining only Bernanos's plot, Pialat reduces the story to the realities and experiences of key figures Donissan, Mouchette, and Depardieu's character's mentor.

Faith's ability to [curdle, derange and imprison] is achingly anatomized in Under the Sun of Satan, the Cannes prizewinner mentioned above. With Gérard Depardieu (whose four films with the director, made between 1980 and 1995, showcase the now-tarnished icon at his magnetic best) in the role of the self-flagellating Father Donissan, the film also features Bonnaire as a murderer whose soul the fanatically devout priest tries to save

Under the Sun of Satan" is an extraordinary film, a religious drama with a carnal ferocity. Whereas Bresson's naturalistic religion condenses a vast force into an infinitesimal gesture, Pialat expands spiritual power to a large-scale struggle that bursts out in physic al and emotional violence.

A close look at these scenes reveals a complex strategy of accumulating violent eruptions and then burying them for long stretches of time while the film reveals other details. Few filmmakers are able to leave so much unresolved from scene to scene, moment to moment, without losing coherence. Pialat's relationship with the audience is one of truth, and his deeply intuitive cinema achieves this by avoiding conclusions as much and as often as possible.

[T]he pain caused by "Under the Sun of Satan"... is less extreme but gnawing and prolonged at a low-grade level through interminable scene after scene in which actors run through page after page of dialogue, all about characters you have no previous knowledge of or events that are equally obscure.