Finding Black Narcissus in Moscow

Further recycling from LiveJournal. The surprise expressed here at finding the DVD soon evaporated as I discovered that Russia had a fantastic back-catalog of foreign films, relatively inexpensive, and well-made. I have my collection still. Years previously I had lived in a house of a friend of Rumer Godden's and often answered the phone to her and we would have brief chats whilst waiting for Dinah to make her way to the phone.

"Browsing in a Moscow store, I found to my surprise a DVD of Powell and Pressburger's 'Black Narcissus'.

It is an extraordinarily sensual film given that it was filmed not in its Himalayan location but in Pinewood Studios and at a house in West Sussex, belonging to a retired Indian army officer, with the help of backdrop painting of convincing light and space.

A group of nuns accepts the offer of an Indian prince to establish a convent in the old palace of his father's concubines! The place's history (and location) works both on the nun's memory and their imagination to 'unhinge' them - to make them both confront their pasts and their vocations (or lack thereof). It comes to a dramatic end when one of the nuns, attired in a new dress, smuggled from Calcutta, makes off to declare her passion for the English agent (and her suspicions, denied, that he is in love with her superior, played by the ineffable Deborah Kerr)!

Rumer Godden, the author of the novel on which the film is based, later described it as 'over-wrought and was to pen a more sensitive exploration of convent life, 'In this House of Brede' but it is fabulous melodrama, acted with aplomb by a stellar cast - and it does ask probing questions on the influence of place, and the history of a place, on our lives. Do places have character, and if so, does that character help shape the lives of those who live there?

It is, also, questions the assumptions we make - the nuns arrive to found a school and provide a dispensary and their intervention in the lives of the hill people is, to their minds, unquestionably good, but they never demonstrate any attempt to fathom the lives of the people they come among. I expect here there is an intended parallel to our colonial enterprise that in India, at least, had ended the year before.

But like all Powell/Pressburger films, finally, you are entranced by the visuals, and the continuing desire to experiment in what was intended as 'mainstream' films - as the escapee nun, Sister Ruth, faints at the agent's rejection the scene is drenched in red, as if you see it from her loss of consciousness, a consciousness saturated in the red of jealousy, and thwarted hope. It is simply brilliant."

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