Leon Morin, pretre (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, pretre has a tightly-wound and somewhat claustrophobic-sounding core: Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), a woman in a small French town, displaced from Paris during wartime, enters the confessional with the aim of mocking the priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo), but ends up relying on him as a spiritual adviser, and perhaps more. Melville’s filming of the initial confession flags his intention: he uses a multitude of angles, dissolving the physical divide between them, creating a figurative filmic space that suggests the transformative significance of what we’re witnessing; thereafter he works predominantly through short scenes separated by blackness, often presenting fragments of narrative for which a full context is missing, creating a sense of a world in which coherence is inherently evasive, perhaps best understood through pointed incursions. The source of the destabilization is the war, pushing people into actions they might not otherwise have countenanced; it’s almost as if the conflict were conceived by God to provide a fertile ground for moral testing (at various times the film addresses collaboration with the enemy, resistance, adultery; it shows one child innocently calling one of the German soldiers her friend, another turning his back on an officer who approaches him). Barny and Morin’s interactions often feel like a kind of game, enjoyed equally (if in different ways) by both sides (Belmondo’s perpetual sense of suppressed amusement is most effective in this regard), but the stakes are deeply serious, and the religious inquiry is as gripping as the exposition of a thriller. When Morin speaks against the ornateness and excessive ceremony of the church, and rails against the congregation from the pulpit for habitually leaving the service early and other slack practices, one almost hears Melville expressing his own evolving film-making aesthetic, underlined by the revelation in the last few minutes of how few possessions Morin owns in the world, followed by a final shot which suggests resultingly elevated capacities.