User Reviews

"I will convert the nations..."

Picture me, feeling paralysed, unable to move as the lights came back on in the theatre.

The cold, bleak, all too real ending hit way too deep.

Léon Morin, Priest was my most anticipated film to watch during the Melville retrospective as I had purposefully held off on watching it for months to save watching it for the first time in theatres.

To be completely honest, I had zero idea what this film was about, from the title, I came with the preconception that it was about Léon. But really, we are guided through Melville's unconditional world through the eyes of Barny, played beautifully by Emmanuelle Riva.

We are greeted to Barny as she attempts to hide her child, half-Jewish, during the Italian occupation of France. With a few mothers, she goes to baptise her daughter at the church.

Shortly after, we learn of Barny's atheist beliefs. Trying to playfully mock the church, she ends up in a confession with Father Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), after assuming from his name that he grew up poor and would be an easier target than a highly educated higher-class priest.

But there's something about Léon that's just so different than any other depiction of a priest I've ever seen in a film. Barny becomes drawn into Léon and set along the backdrop of WWII they become friends. Barny comes up to his dorm after finishing a lent book and they bicker and debate about atheism, religion, homosexuality and the war.

Barny starts to draw sexual affection towards a woman in her office, but as she talks with Morin it seems as if her affection toward this woman depreciates.

She opens up to Morin about her homosexuality asking what to do. He is quick to denounce it stating how there are no men around due to the war and Barny simply obsessed over a woman to fill her crippling loneliness.

During one of their conversations after a doorbell rings, Léon leaves to provide shelter in the church for some, presumably Jewish, fugitives. This is such unorthodox behaviour for, let alone a man, but a priest at the time.

It feels as if Léon doesn't even view himself as a person sometimes, he's merely a vessel for God's will, but then at the same time, he can be so handsy and strangely emotional.

When one of her friends comments that Léon is very "handsome" Barny thinks to herself and realises... yeah, he is handsome. Léon is an objectively beautiful man and it made me as an audience member wonder if Barny truly converts to Christianity because she wants to or out of some way to validate herself in the eyes of Léon.

After the war is over, Barny fantasies about Léon coming into her home and making love to her. Melville clearly shows Barny begin to undress him in the dream, proving to me that Barny is infatuated by the body that is under all of those black robes.

But Léon is strictly married to God and in the eyes of her newfound God, loving Léon is a sin, just like her homosexual feelings toward her coworker.

So Barny is left in this void of emptiness and loneliness. Everything she does or chooses to love is a sin, her husband is dead and the only people she wants to love she cant love.

They'll meet again but in the next world. In this world, they're unfit for one another.

This film is so remarkably different from any of the 9 other films I've seen from Melville.

The first remarkable difference is the lack of any explicit violence (aside from a slap) in such a violent setting. While Le Silence De La Mer is also set during WWII, the lack of violence in that film makes sense because it is all set in a comforting countryside home.

The second being that this film has a female protagonist. Barny is the emotional core and centre of the story. She is an incredibly complex woman with an arc that any of Melville's other female characters simply lack. Not to mention the fact that she's bi-sexual. This spotlight on a woman's struggle feels so wonderfully new for Melville and honest. We are really able to empathise with this beautiful woman in the best possible way. I really wish if Melville lived longer he would've made another film that feels this female-centric.

The third and most central departure is that this film is missing the distinct rhythm and controlled nature that his other films possessed. As I mentioned in my review of Le Cercle Rouge "every piece of (the film) works like perfectly constructed clockwork, each part meticulously crafted from beginning to end." All of Melville's other films feel like a perfectly choreographed and constructed stageplay, in the best possible way. There's this almost theatric side to them all that makes the films stand out and feel, well... so 'Melville'. But that quality seems to be entirely missing from Léon Morin, Priest. While its setting isn't large in scope at all, quite the contrary, the film feels so uncontrolled, so devastatingly real. Melville describes his films as being first and foremost a dream, but the only sense of escapism I got from this film was the actual dream sequence. Léon Morin is a gorgeous film that feels like its own complete thing. If it didn't say it was a film by Jean-Pierre Melville at the beginning, I honest to god would never guess that it was directed by him. This film proves to me how absolutely incredible Melville truly is, not just as a filmmaker, but as a visionary and an artist. This might be his best-directed film in competition with maybe Army Of Shadows.

After the lights came on and the film ended I sunk into my seat, unable to move. The crippling realism of the ending seconds completely broke me emotionally. As I stepped into my car about to drive home, I began to sob insensibly. I can't really explain why, the film isn't really super 'sad' by any means. I just felt so broken, so defeated, so crushed.

This review is my plea for everyone to see this masterpiece. Léon Morin, Priest is but another work of art constructed by "The French Master" Melville.

Watch this piece of pure, unfiltered, rich, beautiful cinema.

Melville's sermon from a Leninist pulpit aims at proving to the commies the respectability of some leftist priests; in short time, Card. Montini was to be elected Pope, and he was a Léon Morin type—leftist, iconoclast, unconventional—though of course far less nice and likable than Belmondo. Melville saluted, from his small Leninist pulpit, the advent of a new fashion—the controversial dim—witted leftist priest.

Belmondo looked well in a cassock; perhaps he even looked like a priest, and this only inasmuch as a trendy Vatican II priest may look anyhow. During the Nazi occupation, Father Léon Morin gives a commie woman a book by a German theologian …--now that's cool ….

As a philosophical fiction, Abbé Morin is not interesting—his theology is incoherent, short—sighted, slapdash and even senile—he simultaneously teaches his spiritual daughter that the Jansenism is a heresy—and that this doesn't really matter; that conversion means commitment, and that the true Church is the invisible one, of the people of good—will …. Such was the fashion of the leftist Sovietized priests. If Jansenism teaching is as good as any other, then why say it's a heresy, in the first place? Why ignore what was puerile and fanatic and gloomy and rigid about the communists as well? Why show the communists as the New Israel, an ideal towards which all Christians must strive to head? And also Morin's smart talk, his smart—ass talk, his being streetwise and if needed firm …; yet there's one scene that I liked ( besides those with Christine and Sabine …)—when Riva bullies the priest and blasphemes about his silences and talks nonsense and Léon Morin tells her than when he was a boy and talking silly his folks were sending him to talk to the walls.

Morin is the fashionable priest of the '60s—ideologue, sentimental, dim—witted, opposed to mostly everything the Church distinctly meant. Of course, Morin is the naughty French version; Greene wrote one for another country, his Quijote priest. The trend was to see in the commies the new Christians. And the Church needed a confirmation from this new sect that organized religion was still possible. Remember Greene's characters—Quixote and his friend the communist politician. Inasmuch as 'Léon Morin' can be deemed representative, it proves also that this fashionable priest was indeed acceptable for the Leninists—they agreed with his ways, etc..

'Léon Morin' is an attempt of making the clergy credible for the communist sect. Otherwise, the script is confused, murky, badly written, clumsy (--as usual with Melville …--); the characters are artificial and abstract, their lines are mere rubbish …. The result is a declamatory, sentimental, intellectually fake movie. Melville shows the party that some priests could be useful.

Léon Morin is the village's sage, the priest who loathes the religious fanatics and the over—pious, and does not loath the commie fanatics; the movie is corny, artificial, abstract and sentimental. The communists' piety does not annoy this Abbé; he reserves his … for the religious piety. Morin is also the quintessential Vatican II priest—open—minded, simplistic, corny, full of slogans, leftist and enemy of the ancient church architecture. The first part of 'Léon Morin' could of been a Godard flick; artistically, the whole movie, as made by Melville, is null.

I saw Melville's flick is an adaptation; so there was a novel as well, and this shows the Vatican II as preceded by a trend and a fashion—the Morin class of priests. The more bright Morins went on to write GAUDIUM AND SPES. Those dim—witted, the average Léon Morin as it were, dislike Papini and columns in the church and pious old people and people praying the Rosary during the Mass; they like Karl Adam and the communists and glass cathedrals and the simplicity of the communist women. Morin adds Lenin to the catechism. The communist Melville liked this.

Truth be told, there are some hot babes in this flick—Sabine and Christine; Christine is the hotter, while Sabine is the smoother—and darker—Riva even likens Sabine to a ray of dark light—now here's communist poetry. The touch of Sapphic love is quite sexy too.

This feels like a break from Melville's previous work, moving from crime to a quieter, more psychological duel between a man and a woman, but it feels like a combination of his early work, in particular Les Enfants Terribles, and the strict moral codes that he had been outlining through the main characters of his later films. It's also a real return to form after the oddly built Two Men in Manhattan. Dropping the visual scope to largely take place in two rooms but also casting two of the biggest French movie stars of the time to help detail the sexual subtext of the action adds something extra that less recognizable actors might not have been able to do as well.

In occupied territory in France during the Second World War, there is a sleepy village that, aside from ration cards and the occasional fire fight outside of town between partisans and German army regulars, seems removed from the war. In this town lives a widow to a Jew, Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), with an unbaptized daughter France (Marielle Gozzi). With the encroaching German forces, Barny and several other women of the town take their children to get them baptized, planning on changing the dates on the baptismal certificates in order to remove any idea that their children are Jewish. This is Barny's first interaction with the Church since her First Communion decades prior, and the effort, combined with her communistic beliefs, leads her to head towards the St. Bernard's one more time as a joke. She will walk into the confessional and challenge the priest directly. Choosing the confessional of Leon Morin, thinking that he would be the son of peasants, she finds a situation she does not expect.

Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a young, attractive man who has taken up the priesthood and counters Barny's challenges head on. When she opens her "confession" by pronouncing religion as the opiate of the masses, Morin says that it can be for some people. His reactions to her provocations take her aback, and she becomes more introspective to the point where Morin giving her a penance and Barny follows through on it. The two begin meeting on a weekly basis for Barny to borrow books from Morin's small library and discuss God. What makes these conversations really interesting isn't the details of epistemology and theology (though it is quite interesting to see the two viewpoints butting heads) but the subtextual attraction between the two.

It doesn't remain subtextual for the whole film, but the first bulk, there's no direct mention to the fact that Barny considers Morin attractive, and yet it seems undeniable. In a town where all the men are gone, taken to the woods to fight as partisans, Leon Morin stands out because if he were in any other profession, he would be married. Casting Belmondo feels like an intentional choice to up the sex appeal as well. Is what brings Barny back to Morin's spare rectory apartment the discussions on God, or is there a sexual component to her visits? Is it one way or two?

We see several other people visit Morin over the course of the film, and they are all attractive young women. The connection through Morin brings Barny closer to Christine (Irene Tunc), a coworker in her approvals office who starts antagonistic. Through both Barny's increasing faith and knowledge that Christine also goes to see Morin, they become friends. The manager of the office, Sabine (Nicole Mirel), Barny develops an infatuation for because, as Barny explains, she has a feminized masculinity that Barny finds attractive. Morin is dismissive of the affection, asserting that Barny does not know how to love, and the attraction falls away after Sabine receives news that her brother has been exiled and most likely killed in foreign camps with her looks and demeanor degrading in response. There's another woman, Lucienne (Gisele Grimm), who is a bit of a floozy and is convinced that she'll be able to sleep with Morin, but she ends up attending confession after he angrily pulls her dress down over her knee to cover her up.

It seems obvious that Morin does not partake of these sins of the flesh, but he is awful close to them all of the time. He has a strong sense of faith and can speak well with those who challenge him, but why does he only seem to engage with young, attractive women? This intersection of the faith of the mind and heart with the reality of life in the real world is the heart of the film, and it's not just from Morin's point of view. It's mostly from Barny's, and her actual goal is always somewhat muddy on purpose. She says she wants faith after her first conversation with Morin, but is she just falling into the little game that Morin seems to play with all of the young women of the village?

In the background of all of this is the war. Italians are replaced by Germans (including Howard Vernon in a small cameo that may or may not be him reprising his role from La Silence de la Mer) who are then replaced by Americans (one of whom becomes super aggressive towards Barny as she walks France home from the boarders who had kept her up). A hotel is bombed out, and reprisals are made against collaborators. None of it ends up being that immediately important to the questions of God, His will, and His existence. The movie never comes to a solid answer in a pious and preachy sort of way, but there are implications about the good of religion in the life of Barny. She becomes more selfless and helpful to those in need, in particular a Jewish family in hiding, after the insistence of Morin. She becomes more friendly with her enemy at work.

However, she cannot deny her desires for Morin, and when she calls his bluff, Morin storms out. Why can't he be dismissive of her like when he thought it was a joke? He presents himself as this man of purity, but is he hiding some kind of temptation and desire that he doesn't act upon? Is he only a man? If he is only a man, has he led her down a human path and not a divine one?

Most of this is implied, not explicit, but it's definitely there. When Barny fantasizes/dreams of Morin coming into her room to make love to her, it's the film getting the most explicit about the central idea. She's obviously been attracted to him by this point (outright admitting it in a bit of voiceover earlier), but he refuses that sort of intimate touch. Where does that leave her? Where is she in her faith? Is her faith driven by physical needs (in this instance, the touch of a man) or by spiritual needs? What drives her movement towards God? When Morin is sent to another parish (a mission to the middle of France, as he puts it), what will become of Barny's faith?

Like much of great art, there are no easy answers, the film just leaves you with questions to ponder. This is a surprising work from Melville as well. He had started on his path in crime pictures with Bob Le Flambeur, but his earlier stuff was more psychological in nature. This is a combination of intellectualism, spiritualism, and character-based emotion that didn't really feel like was in his wheelhouse. Far from thinking he was any sort of bad director, his cinematic interests felt more visceral and less cerebral. And yet, at the same time, this fits perfectly in with the thematic ideas of his films. The psychological aspect is present in the duel between Barny and Morin. Morin has a code of ethics that he may or may not be able to live up to.

Leon Morin, Priest is a serious-minded film for adults that uses its characters to look into hard questions about faith in difficult times. It represents a talented filmmaker showing that he can work beyond his familiar territory while still making the film his own. It is a great film.

. . . doubtless is ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE. While it's true that the plot of LEON MORIN is a lot more abstract, perplexing and complicated than the straight forward approach utilized in the later 1994 offering, Leon's gender-bending proclivity to brush up against lady parishioners in His sanctuary is enough to make Ray Finkle proud. While the German storm troopers berated by the local urchins provide a tamer milieu for Father Leon than the cut-throat Miami Dolphins surrounding ACE, they do enforce a noise ordinance violation against the padre when they first come to town. It's true that some revisionists have accused Ray's PET DETECTIVE character of being a demeaning caricature of America's endangered gender community. However, the perverse Roman cultists using sticks, rods and branches for excitement and companionship are far more frightening and jaw-dropping than even ACE's shenanigans in THE MASK.

This has to be the least typical Jean-Pierre Melville film out there. He was a director mostly famed for his suspenseful thrillers, in particular his neo-noirs. Léon Morin is pretty far removed from this type of film. It is a lot closer to Army of Shadows a film Melville made about the French Resistance movement. This one too takes place in occupied France, except the war takes a back seat to a story about an unorthodox romance and much religious philosophising. In it a priest tries to steer a faithless woman onto a righteous path. She falls for him leading to considerable sexual tension.

Jean-Paul Belmondo stars in this one and is really very good in an atypical role as the priest Léon Morin. He and his co-star Emmanuelle Riva work well together and are both very convincing. It's a romantic drama even if the relationship never flowers. Morin is more interested in her spiritual development – there is much intellectual musings on a variety of religious matters. Aside from this the story looks at life in France under the Nazis and how different people chose different ways in dealing with this situation. In some ways the film is certainly a critique of France during this time, while there is some very frank sexual discussions; it's no surprise at all, therefore, that the film met with substantial censorship problems. To be honest though, despite being an undoubtedly intelligent offering, this is the least enjoyable Melville film I have seen. It does have some interesting ideas but overall I found it to be a little tedious.