Novitiate (2017)
Directed by Margaret Betts
In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church.
3 connections found
View:
3 films that influenced Novitiate
What critics say influenced Novitiate
Her performance immediately joins the all-time great screen depictions of domineering clergywomen — right up there with the late Geraldine McEwan in “The Magdalene Sisters” and Agata Kulesza in last year’s Sundance-premiered “The Innocents.”
Missing the sexual hysteria of Mexican remake Muchachas in Uniform (1951), or the Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus (1947), and avoiding plenty of vile abuses as those brought against the captive young wards of 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters (even Nicloux’s remake of The Nun presents as seedier than this) lends Betts’ film a sometimes-neutered tone, perhaps to build sympathy for the plight of the nuns and the limited capacity Vatican II’s revisions afforded them.
This is not like The Magdalene Sisters, the 2003 film set in a 1960s Irish girls school (run by nuns and priests) that focused on the brutalization of women in a strict Catholic environment.
I hate movies about priests, nuns, delusional dogma and religious obsession of any kind, but a startling, powerful, keenly nuanced and beautifully made film about young girls struggling to become nuns under anti-diluvian conditions ranks high up there with The Magdalene Sisters and Black Narcissus as an unforgettable portrait of spirituality under stress.
Writer/director Maggie Betts' feature directorial debut is meant to illustrate how Vatican II reforms completely changed nunhood in the Catholic Church by following one young woman's journey at the height of the controversy (one third left their vocations over a decade), but her tone flirts with the hysteria of Ken Russell's "The Devils," giving her film a camp quality she surely never intended.
No one is going to mistake Novitiate for Ken Russell’s The Devils, or one of the many lesser “nunsploitation” films that came out in the ’70s, but it crosses the line between austerity and titillation a few times.
Some may find the heaving and excess too reminiscent of Ken Russell’s crazy 1971 campfest The Devils (like that’s a bad thing!), but others will be impressed with the restraint and respectfulness of the more erotic scenes.
Fans of Monty Python, first-wave L.A. punk band Catholic Discipline, and Ken Russell’s The Devils may want to steer clear of this intimate and graceful portrait of the harshly regimented life in a convent circa 1964-65.
Novitiate , Betts' narrative feature writing/directing debut, shares a few qualities with Damien Chazelle's superb Whiplash .
If there’s a level of nuance to her character, it’s thanks to Leo, who finds humanity amid sadistic glee (her nun is an analog to J.K. Simmons’ abusive teacher in Whiplash), rather than the script, which is based on real present-day and former nuns’ memoirs.