Under the Sun of Satan

A film set in the French provinces. Donissan is a young priest. He carries a hard faith and punishes himself constantly. He beats himself with a chain at night. His superior knows and is worried. One night, walking on a road, he meets a man. The man says he is a horse trader. They talk. Then he says something else. He tells him who he is. The encounter is held long and the narrative does not separate whether it is real or imagined. After that night something changes in Donissan. He can see inside people. From there the film moves to a second line. Mouchette is sixteen. The daughter of a rich family, with two men. She is pregnant. She argues with one of them and shoots him. Nobody knows. Donissan sees her on the road. Without asking he tells her what she did. She breaks. What the narrative is interested in is not faith but harm: its idea is that the priest seeing the truth saves nobody, and that whether the gift is a grace or a punishment is left unclear. The last section is an attempt at a miracle. A child has died and Donissan tries to raise him. The result is left unsettled. The narrative offers consolation nowhere and does not settle into a religious frame either. Maurice Pialat's method is evident. Long takes, conversations without cuts, scenes without music, and hard light. Pialat also acts in it; the priest who is Donissan's superior. The source is Georges Bernanos's novel. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1987. The hall booed at the ceremony and Pialat raised his fist and told the audience that he did not like them either. Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat and Alain Artur are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the hard vein of French cinema and films that look at religion without belief. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative flow; the film proceeds in deliberate fragments and explains no scene.