Black Narcissus
Writers & Directors ~ Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
1947, UK
Cast ~ Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Flora Robson, Sabu, Kathleen Byron
Mostly, it’s just a gorgeous film to look at with all the billowing nuns’ habits and wimples in the windy rooms and corridors of a Himalayan Palace of Mopu, a harem-turned-convent atop a mountain staring across to clouds and down a scenic cliff face – all made at Pinewood’s studio, England. The landscape paintings by W. Percy Day are breath-taking, Alfred Junge’s production design striking, Jack Smith’s cinematography sumptuous, the whole artifice is dreamlike and evocative rather than uncanny. It is described in Rumer Godden’s source novel as feeling “like the edge of the world; far more remote than it actually is, perhaps it looks at such immensity.” Apparently, Godden disliked the film’s “phoney” look and the lean into melodrama, but these are at the core of what makes the film a giddy exuberance.
As a visual interpretation of the novel’s exotica, Powell and Pressberger’s film is ripe, full of sultry and outraged glances. In fact, it is not a misdemeanour to find the melodrama and decoration already in Godden’s text, although it could equally be as austere as Bergam or Dryer. Deborah Kerr brings some subtlety, David Farrar brings all the buff as Mr Dean, and Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth is practically German Expressionism, Silent Cinema. In a screening I intended, every maddened glare from Byron, every open-shirted expression of machismo from Byron was met with modern giggles, right up to and including the denouement. But the novel itself has Sister Ruth troublesome and inflected with hysteria from the start, behaving in exaggerated fashion and bluntly xenophobic: the hysteria is in the original text. But the film is such a startling formal achievement of manufactured beauty and overheated dramatics that it overcomes its datedness.
There is the unfortunate brownface which is a flaw that mars the film’s magnificence and critique of colonialism. Set against the decline of English colonial rule ~ 1947 was the year of Indian Independence with a history of atrocities on both sides ~ it is, after all, a portrayal of the failure of the nuns to impose themselves on an indigenous community. For all their piousness and performance of doing good, the nuns harbour repressed but offhand prejudice and condescension as well as desire: Sister Clodagh dismissing the holy man on the mountain, for example. There is casual character racism, but the film does not treat the villagers with contempt: or rather, they are not drawn in broader strokes than anyone else. The brownface is problematic, dating it horribly, surely the result of the directors keeping to Pinewood studios soundstages and established names rather than locations. The worst offence is surely Jean Simmons and Esmond Knight. Simmons is there only to ravish Sabu with her eyes, a silenced foreign exoticism. Ultimately, it is left to Sabu to represent the dignity of the non-whites, which he does effortlessly, being a performer with obvious playful intelligence and a twinkle in the eye: indeed, he brings this quality to the character of the Young General who certainly seems to know how to play the game to manipulate the self-absorbed whites; and it can also be noted that of all the characters, he is the only one to get what he wants.
Similarly, the gender roles conform to the time and the melodrama, and although the British agent Dean is all masculine personified and the nuns horny, he may flirt but he does not take advantage of them. Even Kanchi, the seventeen-year-old girl that has been stalking him, he imposes on the nuns to keep her at a distance and to “improve”. In the book, a nun says he has a “wicked” but “charming” face: they like the bad boys. He also uses his male status to berate Sister Clodagh on the flaws and narrowmindedness of her Faith (“What would Jesus do?”). His reputation is disreputable, but based upon the evidence, he has moved on. Certainly, he seems lost, a little broken, and finds the nuns’ religious practice inadequate for his beliefs; he has found himself a sort-of peace in this out-of-the-way place and culture. In the Gothic tradition, it is as if this place has a supernatural influence: says Sister Phillipa,
“Mopu had run away with me, I was obsessed with it and the mountain and my work in the garden. Yes, I think I was really obsessed. There’s something in this place, I don’t trust myself here. I mean it when I say I daren’t stay.” (pg. 160)
But really, it can be argues that it is simply that their religious piety is no match for the splendour of natural beauty.
The National Legion of Decency called it "an affront to religion and religious life" for characterising it as "an escape for the abnormal, the neurotic and the frustrated", causing cuts supervised and consented to by Pressberger. Alternatively, Martin Scorsese described it as “A cross between Disney and a horror film,” and certainly there’s a blend of the Gothic madness and of a Disney’s fantasy to it all. It is deliberate and precise but giddy and gorgeous with its own evocation of passionate cinema: one could almost see a metaphor for the filmmakers in the nuns’ formalism losing its rigidity when confronted with the intoxicating exoticism of a foreign place. “There’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated,” Mr. Dean says, and the film takes this to heart.
