Léon Morin, prêtre (1961)

Léon Morin, prêtre is a French romantic film drama first released in 1961, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.  The film is based on a novel by Béatrix Beck and stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, Emmanuelle Riva, Irène Tunc, Nicole Mirel and Gisèle Grimm.  It has also been released under the title: Leon Morin, Priest.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Barny is a young widow living with her daughter in a small French town during the Nazi Occupation.  A communist militant and staunch atheist, she considers that her view of life is rational and morally sound.  One day, she enters a church with the intention of criticising religion with a Catholic priest.  It so happens that the priest she chooses - Léon Morin - is young, handsome and persuasive.  Far from rebuffing her, he listens attentively to Barny’s protestations and then offers a compelling counter-argument.  Fascinated by the young priest, Barny begins to pay him regular visits and a close friendship ensues.  Morin believes that he has won a new convert, but Barny soon realises that what she wants from him is not spiritual guidance but love...

Director Jean-Pierre Melville provoked a fair amount of controversy with his fifth feature, Léon Morin, prêtre, an uncompromising adaptation of Béatrix Beck’s award-winning novel of the same title.  Whilst his film was favourably received in some quarters (it was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1961 Venice Film Festival), others condemned it for its perceived immoral content (a woman having sexual fantasies over a priest and suggestive references to lesbianism).  Influenced by the bad press the film garnered, the cinema-going public gave it a wide berth.  It was not many years after the film’s muted release that critical opinion changed drastically (presumably in the light of Melville’s subsequent successes) and today Léon Morin, prêtre is considered an important work in the director’s oeuvre, one his most incisive and profound explorations of the human psyche.

The film is the second of three films made by Melville which are set at the time of the Nazi Occupation of France, the others being Le Silence de la Mer (1949) and L’Armée des ombres (1969).  The theme that directly connects these three films (and relates them to the director’s other work) is the idea of resistance through rigorous adherence to a personal moral code or belief system; this was a subject that was dear to Melville’s heart as he had actively supported the French Resistance during the Second World War.  Here, the antagonists are not wartime enemies, as they are in the other two films, but a man and a woman who inhabit completely different worlds and who are irresistibly drawn to one another - he by a desire to save another soul, she by desire tout court.  Both characters are complex, morally ambiguous individuals who manage to delude themselves as their friendship develops into something deeper and far less innocent.  The priest, Léon Morin, emerges as something of a hypocrite, a kind of intellectual Don Juan who consciously uses his obvious sexual charms to lure lonely women into church so that he can make good Catholics of them.  Morin is visibly aware of the power he exerts over his female parishioners, yet he chastises them as though they were demonically possessed as soon as they start making amorous advances.  The main female protagonist, Barny, is just as morally confused - she allows Morin to make a convert of her, not because she believes in God, but because the alternative that she so desperately craves, sexual conquest, is denied her.  Morin wants Barny’s soul; she merely wants his body.  Neither desire can be fulfilled, and so the quiet game of seduction and resistance is played out for as long as possible, ending, appropriately, once the Nazis have withdrawn from the town. 

What makes this such a compelling film are the extraordinary performances from its two lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva.  Both actors had recently achieved international recognition through two early films of the French New Wave - the former in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), the latter in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959).   Belmondo is perfectly cast as the young priest that no woman can resist, and delivers what is easily one of his finest performances (a model of restraint and sensitivity compared with what he would contribute to many of his subsequent films).  Although Belmondo and Melville had a strained working relationship, they would work together on two further films, Le Doulos (1962) and L’Aîné des Ferchaux (1963). Emmanuelle Riva’s portrayal of a woman tormented by unrequited love is equally arresting and gives the film its harrowing realism and poignancy.  Both performances are complemented by the film’s austere realist design, the bleakness of the wartime setting underlined by the work of Melville’s trusted cinematographer Henri Decaë.  Léon Morin, prêtre is a powerfully moving study in desire and moral conflict, arguably the darkest and most unsettling of all Jean-Pierre Melville’s films.

© James Travers 2011

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