Film Forum

(1966, Jacques Rivette) Paris, 1750s. Forced to take vows, rebellious nun Anna Karina is shunned, tortured, and then exorcised by her austere community; and at last finds relief in a fun-loving, sorority-like convent, where she becomes the latest plaything of Mother Superior Liselotte Pulver (Cagney’s secretary in Wilder’s One, Two, Three). A tour de force for New Wave icon Karina, straight from Rivette’s stage adaptation (produced by Anna’s then-husband Jean-Luc Godard), itself adapted from Denis Diderot’s pre-Revolution novel. Rewritten three times before it was passed by the French censors – only to be banned for over a year by the Minister of Information. 4K DCP restoration. Approx. 140 min.

Reviews

“A beautiful, calm, austere movie that somehow manages to be remarkably faithful to the original, yet quite different in tone… Miss Karina’s beauty is the perfect centerpiece for a film that looks cool and graceful but is passionately determined with the heart of a revolutionary. It’s a lovely performance [that] grows in strength with each new outrage so that the final, very wild moments of the film have the kind of conviction that transforms melodrama into something a good deal more important.” 
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times