Film: Black Narcissus

We decided to watch a film last night after Anya had gone to bed and dug out Black Narcissus. I was wondering if it was going to be as impressive this time around as when I first saw it--a lot of the drama of it comes from the unexpected turns of the plot--but it holds up brilliantly.

It is of course utterly over the top melodrama, and the novel it's based on is no doubt justly forgotten. But that points up the differences between the two genres: the film works well precisely because it is so melodramatic--as one of the characters says at one point: "There's something in the atmosphere here that makes everything seem exaggerated." You can get away with melodrama on film because it's visual and visceral; the audience doesn't get a chance to sit back and grow sceptical.

The visual element is what really makes this film stand out. This was still a relatively early colour film: you sense that the directors were still enamoured of the new medium, and determined to use it to do new things. I think that creative excitement is part of what has kept it looking so fresh: it's only relatively recently, with the dawn of computer-based manipulation, that directors have started putting as much effort into the visual design of their films as Powell and Pressburger did here, back in the late 1940s. The palette is all blues, yellows and whites; red is so rarely seen that each instance of it is shocking.

The story is basically a haunted house tale, except the ghosts are of the living. Half-a-dozen nuns are sent to the edge of the Himalayas to establish a mission hospital; set up in a crumbling cliff-edge palace where a local monarch once kept his harem, the desires and feelings they have kept repressed for the cloister start to flourish and bloom in the mountain air. There is a touch of The Turn of the Screw in the whole thing: the nuns are following in the footsteps of a bunch of Franciscan friars who were only able to stick it out for five months, and Deborah Kerr has a slightly governessish quality about her.

Naturally enough, nature takes its course and the sisters are unable to hold it together. In many ways this reflects a long-standing British idea of the sublime, in which dramatic landscapes are in some way deranging to the well-ordered mind. Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, joked that gothic was impossible in England because the hills were too low and the valleys too shallow. In the same way, it seems inevitable that putting a bunch of Catholic nuns on a cliff at the edge of the Himalayas will engender gothic. Repression can't survive long in close proximity to the sublime.

It's a truly wonderful film, despite a few touches which date it (the role of the palace's housekeeper is taken by an old music hall actress, who plays it for laughs in the manner of a Shakespearean rude mechanical). The performances are solid but not spectacular: Deborah Kerr as the Sister Superior Clodagh and David Farrar as a raffish agent on the fringes of the Raj are decent; Kathleen Byron as the unhinged Sister Ruth hams it up a bit too much.

But of course you're not looking at the performances, you're looking at the imagery: the ranks of white wimples against blue washed walls; modest eyes cast away from lubricious frescoes; the shock of a scarlet dress, cherry lipstick, or sweat beading on a forehead; the gorgeous, ominous amber light of dawn in the final sequence; Byron appearing through a doorway, deranged and dishevelled, like an avenging angel. Her death is filmed with oblique genius: a stand of green bamboo swaying against a blue sky; the clatter of tribal drums; a flutter of birds rising in alarm.