I admire Georges Franju a lot and his documentaries at the beginning of his career are exceptionally disturbing and thought provoking, and his ' Blood of Beasts ' set in a slaughter house is arguably his most controversial and greatest film. Due to the amount of cruelty shown in this film it is not often seen. Then he made more conventional narrative films, and his ' Eyes Without A Face ' is perhaps his best thanks partly to the casting of Alida Valli and Edith Scob. Once again cruelty prevails and audiences often felt ill watching it. ' La Faute de l'abbe Mourut ' is sadly a mixture of badly filmed eroticism mainly showing women's breasts and acts of cruelty. No spoilers except to say that the cutting off of a human ear leaving a man squirming and screaming is not for the faint hearted. Neither is the corporal punishment scenes inflicted on children, who because they are poor will go to hell with all of its punishments graphically described. This by a man who is part of the Catholic church. Catholicism takes quite a knocking in the film in general. Francis Huster plays a handsome young priest and he could have been directed better as he is a good actor, but the scenes he has in a garden as big as a forest with a young woman played by Gillian Hills is painfully bad to watch. The music soundtrack is terrible and there is even a snake to signify that this is a ' bad ' place. These scenes take up a lot of film time and drag it down, and the final scene involving a statue of the Virgin Mary does not help. To sum up the film is more failure than inspired cinema, and for whatever reason Franju lets himself down. A curious experience if you like the director, and there are scenes worth seeing but overall nowhere near to be rated highly.
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jromanbaker4 August 2023
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dbdumonteil15 December 2005The IMDb users know George Franju as the "les yeux sans visage " director,one of the best horror movies (who said best?) France has ever produced.His "la Tete contre les Murs" was at least as interesting but his remake of Feuillade' s "Judex" was not as convincing.
"La faute de l'abbé Mouret" is one of the weakest books in the Rougon -Macquart saga .Its "scandalous" side -a priest falling in love with a beautiful girl-seems tame by today's standards ,and it already was thirty-five years ago when I saw the film in a theater.Also handicapped by Gillian Hills's amateurish playing ,the movie was a flop.Francis Huster ,an earnest thespian (he used to play Corneille's "Le Cid" ) became famous but he had to wait until the eighties .The lack of good parts in the films probably led him to come back to stage again in the nineties.Best parts take place in the village where Franju shows his die-hard anti-clericalism,and André Lacombe as Archangias steals every scene he is in.but all that concerns "the Paradou" (the garden) sounds "hippie" and has not worn well.
The most famous scene is the heroine's strange suicide :she uses flowers. -
philosopherjack13 May 2022Georges 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.