Georges Franju’s La
faute de l’abbe Mouret contains major elements of both hell-and-damnation
Catholic severity and flower child-inflected dreaminess; one’s assessment of
the film’s success (mine differed across separate viewings) may depend on the
extent to which the two cohere. Young Abbott Mouret, bearing a Bressonian
pallor and sense of self-denial, serves in a rural village of little apparent
piety (the film opens on two locals having sex in a field), and after a sudden
collapse which largely wipes out his memory, he’s taken by unknown means to a
nearby house occupied by a fiery atheist, whose daughter Albine nurses him back
to health. The two walk daily in the adjacent walled-off garden (visualized in
extravagantly lovely terms, its centerpiece an overpowering abundance of
flowering roses), where they eventually make love, like two innocents
discovering something that was previously beyond imagining. But a prolonged shot of a snake on a
tree makes all too clear the fragile nature of this paradise, and when a storm
brings down the wall, Mouret’s memory returns, along with an even more austere
sense of vocation. The film contains some punishing moments, such as Mouret’s unrelenting colleague terrorizing children with his pitch-black
vision of their future, but the proffered alternative is no less ungrounded;
Albine claims that the garden supposedly contains a magic tree that distorts
one’s sense of time, and tells him an origin story that sounds like a fairy
tale. Mouret’s actions end in tragedy, triggering one of cinema’s more unusual
suicides, and a shocking act of violence; the final scene, a fusion of inner
and outer worlds, could be read to suggest that Mouret’s external fealty shrouds
a transgressive inner life, even a surrender to the devil. Given the
considerably lighter nature of Franju’s subsequent film, Shadowman, it
may constitute the last great enigma of a fascinatingly shifting body of work.
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