by Raymond Durgnat
Young Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), of an Anglo-Catholic order, is appointed Sister Superior of a new convent, St. Faith’s, to be established, with dispensary and school, among mountain peasants north of Darjeeling. The local ruler, the Old General (Esmond Knight), has given them a ‘palace’ (once his father’s “House of Women”). Sister Clodagh is assigned Sisters Briony, Philippa (Flora Robson), Blanche, and Ruth (Kathleen Byron), a problem nun. The English agent, Mr. Dean (David Farrar), is helpful but disconcertingly sardonic; Sister Clodagh’s resolve to manage without him is undermined by the atmosphere (keening winds, a silent holy man, sensual murals) and a variety of events.
The central conflict in Black Narcissus is unusually diffuse, and multi-factorial. These reasonably well-balanced nuns run a chapel, a school, a dispensary and a garden; they combine faith and works, commitment and tolerance, vision and revision (their vows are renewable annually). At this ‘edge of the world’, however, their ‘team for all seasons’ synthesis is subtly destabilised by a miscellany of exotic attitudes. This Himalayan kingdom parades values which the nuns’ utilitarian idealism excludes: peacock males, sensuality, kingly power, female as sex object, a peasantry so unaccustomed to philanthropy that it refuses free health care, and disconcerting manipulations (the local despot pays the peasants to attend the school and clinic, despite their suspicions).
The realm of the excluded is also a looking-glass world, for much of this exoticism is oddly familiar. The despot combines fairy-tale whimsicality with a semi-adaptation to Western ideas. Indeed, his cynical-enlightened use of money makes him a distinctly Shavian despot. But although a universal practicality indwells this mysterious Orient, its order is other and unknown to the nuns, and to us. It hits us as a sequence of brightly hued, yet emotionally forbidding phenomena, a pattern of extremes or paradoxical combinations. Examples: high on a mountainside, the convent is ravaged by cold winds but, directly under it, lies a tropical valley which at one point resembles a jungle with tribe; the pagan holy man unnerves the nuns, first by surpassing them in austerity and prayer, then by invalidating those very aspects through his eerie indifference to his own son’s death.
The nuns are basically right, yet always wrong. Is their chastity, or their devotion, an ‘Oriental’ extreme? Yet, when Sister Ruth essays a return to ‘normal’, secular passions, that’s wrong too. She throws her passion at Mr. Dean a little as the nuns throw their philanthropy at the peasants; and her love promptly generates paranoia, much as the village mothers think the nuns’ medicine poisons their children. In a sense, Sister Ruth combines the worst of both worlds: Western hot-headedness with Eastern schizo-extremism.
The conflict(s) involve very complex patterns of opposites-and-equivalence. For the East/West opposition is dialecticised through mediating figures – Mr. Dean exerts an Eastern control over the sexually provocative orphan Kanchi (Jean Simmons) – and by the sense of recognition lurking under the exotic (many of the issues here could be rapidly transposed into some G.B. Shaw-spirited play about nuns and slum Cockneys). And there are criss- cross conflicts within each camp – on the Western side: nuns, Mr. Dean, Sister Ruth; flowers versus vegetables.
Under the drama, archaeo-psychological structures lurk. Sisters Clodagh and Ruth are Jekyll and Hyde, character anagrams. More pervasive is childishness. The parent (authority, coping) figures include Sister Clodagh, Mr. Dean, the Old General, and the holy man. The children include Sister Ruth (jealous, clumsy, hysterical, rebellious), the Young General (Sabu; charming, irresponsible), and Kanchi. Eastern ‘schizo-excess’ is a perpetual childhood, with magic sexuality: charming, glittering, whimsical, absolutist, volatile, dangerous. Beside the sturdily responsible nuns, the East is a land of fairy-tale with princes, a beggar-maid, toy-like costumes.
This variegation of issues is further diversified by Michael Powell’s pictorialism, with its multi- styled finesses, and by the sinuosities of Emeric Pressburger’s unusual, but classical, story construction. Appropriately for the Gandhi era, it’s an empire-building, or empire- relinquishing, tale. But equally it’s a post-modernist stream-of-consciousness, with hues, details, resurgent flashbacks. In Rumer Godden – the author of the original novel, brought up in colonial India but herself a literary criss-cross – Virginia Woolf meets Rudyard Kipling.
In two other films, an organic, ‘humanist’, meaning-bearing structure confronts a schizo- archaic one, and barely survives. In John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), another Christian community, the Round Table – neat symbol for a pluralist unity – confronts seemingly marginal, exotic, beautiful forces. In Apocalypse Now (1979), the ‘Eastern’ despotism is a land of severed heads planted like signposts, while alienated logic blossoms into unbalanced excess. In contrast to their end-of-the-world violence, Black Narcissus, in 1947, is content with its edge-of-the-world atmospheric.
(This essay has been adapted from articles by Raymond Durgnat which originally appeared in the Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1984. Copyright the British Film Institute.)