A serious movie about serious people, a seriously self-doubting priest and a seriously conscience-stricken sinner (a mistress and murderess), with a serious appearance by the Devil Himself, a serious bout of telepathy, a serious dabble in vampirism, a serious visitation by a ghost, and a serious miracle. This last is the nearest thing in a generation, though still nowhere near equal, to Carl Dreyer's Ordet: Maurice Pialat, miles from Dreyer, is an avowed nonbeliever. (It is fitting, then, that his adaptation from the oeuvre of Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos should have centered on a work that expresses an almost blasphemous sense of futility and inconsolability.) A director with a past bent toward formless and scruffy naturalism (Loulou, A Nos Amours, Police), Pialat meets this loftier material with an altogether new demeanor, formal, calm, focussed. (It is not preposterous to speak of him as inspired.) He plunges us at the very outset into a roiling spiritual crisis, in a dim-lit interior that, appropriately enough, is afforded no geographical or temporal co-ordinates. The drama gradually opens up to give us some bearings, to reveal a credible place and time, but it remains unyieldingly interior, introspective, intellectual. "Why aren't we like animals?" the sinner laments at one point: "They live and die unthinkingly." You would have to look far to find people on screen further than these from animals. With Gerard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.