Soeur Sourire (2009) - film review

Jeannine Deckers, better known as Soeur Sourire or The Singing Nun, became an international pop star in the 1960s.  Her albums sold by the millions and in 1963 her hit song Dominque overtook the Beatles and Elvis Presley in the charts.  But her fame was short-lived and she was soon forgotten by all but her most loyal fans.  Her career petered out in the 1980s and her life was to end in tragedy.  Who exactly was Jeannine Deckers?

Jeannine Deckers, better known as The Singing Nun, may not have enjoyed anything like the longevity of Edith Piaf or Serge Gainsbourg, but she is just as deserving of a biopic as these singing legends, as this eye-opening film from Belgian filmmaker Stijn Coninx amply demonstrates.  Under her original stage name, Soeur Sourire, Deckers was catapulted to international fame in 1963 with the release of her single Dominique, which became a worldwide hit and reached number one in the American pop charts (the first Belgian song to do so).  What made this achievement all the more remarkable (other than the fact that the song is so unutterably twee that it will cause your cranium to explode if you listen to it more than three times) was that Deckers belonged, at the time, to a Dominican order of nuns who, apparently, did nothing to encourage her talent for music.  As Coninx’s biopic demonstrates, Deckers was far from being the saintly heroine she was portrayed as in the media at the height of her fame, and her life was anything but a bed of roses.  She was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a monster.

Stijn Coninx is best known for his 1992 film Daens, another biographical piece on the life of a famous Belgian priest.  Soeur Sourire is a far less distinguished offering but it should be credited for presenting Deckers’ life story with brutal honesty, not glossing over the more sordid and controversial aspects of the singer’s life, as Henry Koster did in his painfully anodyne 1966 film The Singing Nun (featuring Debbie Reynolds).  Right from the off, Deckers is portrayed as a headstrong egoist who rejects all kinds of authority (how odd that she should choose to be a nun) and treats everyone with contempt, including the woman who later becomes her lesbian lover and death companion.  Deckers is shown to be arrogant, self-centred and wilfully aggressive, so much so that it is extremely hard for the audience to sympathise with her, which is perhaps the main shortcoming of the film.  Coninx’s Deckers has so few redeeming features that it is nigh on impossible to engage with her.  If Coninx loathes her, as he so evidently does, why should we warm to her? 

Cécile De France was reputedly delighted to have been offered the role of Jeannine Deckers and she fits the part so perfectly that you might think she had been the singer’s understudy.  At 35, the Belgian actress is highly sought after by both French and Belgian filmmakers and deserves her international reputation.  Soeur Sourire is arguably one of her career highpoints, even if the film overall struggles to match the excellence of her personal contribution.  Cécile De France not only bears a striking physical resemblance to Deckers, she also has no difficulty conveying her complex, contradictory personality, and does so with unfaltering conviction.  One minute Deckers is a sweet nun smiling beatifically, a picture of innocence; the next she is the Devil’s own mistress, lunging out at anything that gets in her way and generally behaving like a class A bitch.  The supporting cast provide a more than satisfactory complement to De France’s feisty screen presence; the one inspired touch is the casting of Tsilla Chelton (a much-loved doyenne of French cinema) as an elderly nun who has a mischievous streak that pointedly mirrors Deckers’ wayward nature.

Soeur Sourire goes some way towards unbundling the complex personality that was Jeannine Deckers but it falls short of giving a totally coherent and credible picture.  The film’s allusions to the way in which the singer was cynically exploited and abandoned by her record company and the Catholic church are pretty mealy mouthed and the you can’t help feeling the director was just a little too cautious (by which I mean utterly petrified) of causing offence.  (This is also apparent in Coninx’s decision not to refer to Deckers’ sister in the film - he replaces her with a fictitious cousin.) The sketchy suggestion that Deckers’ suicide in 1985 was the result of her being ripped off by Philips and the Church (leaving her with a staggering tax demand) deserves to have been fleshed out with far more detail, not reduced to a brief, muddled montage that you have to watch three times to understand.  It is a shame that Coninx felt he had to skate over the most intriguing elements of Deckers’ life story, because such obvious pusillanimity weakens the film’s authenticity and prevents the tragic ending from having the impact it deserves.  The Singing Nun should have been laid to rest with slightly more respect than this (even if her most famous song has been known to cause permanent brain damage).

© James Travers 2012

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