Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (1971)
Directed by Joël Séria

Film Review

Joël Séria could not have made a more auspicious and provocative start to his filmmaking career than with Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (a.k.a. Don't Deliver Us From Evil), a Satanic gamine rehash of Les 400 coups that revels in its gruesomely Baudelairean take on nascent teen sexuality.  The film's portrayal of two demonic adolescents casually inflaming the male libido in between lesser sins - murdering caged birds and desecrating the rituals of the Catholic mass - was unlikely to go down well with the predominantly conservative press at the time and, inevitably, it soon fell foul of an all too puritanical government censor.  An unwarranted ban may have robbed Séria's extraordinary debut feature of the critical acclaim it deserved at the time but it did not prevent it from going on to become a cult classic, one of the few auteur offerings from a French filmmaker to broach the thorny subject of teenage sexual awakening with barefaced honesty, and with a stark and sensual poetry to rival anything from the French New Wave.

It would be another five years before Séria was able to win over both critics and audiences with Les Galettes de Pont-Aven, a comically erotic re-telling of Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence.  This, along with his subsequent Marie-poupée (1976), a brave foray into fetishism, revealed a remarkably astute auteur filmmaker of rare originality and honesty,  The critical reaction to Marie-poupée was not positive, however, and the predictable public backlash effectively put the kibosh on Séria's career, forcing him to toe the line of mainstream acceptability by sticking to safer subjects for the remainder of his career in cinema and television.  Had the critics been kinder to hum, Séria could easily have been one of the leading auteurs of the post-French New Wave generation.

That Joël Séria deserved better is immediately apparent from just one casual viewing of Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal.  A far cry from the anodyne coming-of-age mush that was prevalent at the time, this represents a dazzlingly authentic exploration of the diabolic primeval perversity that is so much a part of the human condition - a canker of the soul that has its most devastating and lasting impact in early adolescence, when the individual is at his most vulnerable and is least well equipped to cope with the primal impulses that assail him amid that hormonal tempest that marks the onset of adulthood.  The film takes as its inspiration a notorious real-life story from 1954, dubbed the Parker-Hulme murder case, in which a teenage girl killed her mother in cold blood with the help of her best friend.

What made the film so especially shocking to a contemporary French audience is that the two depraved youngsters are not your usual argot-spitting urban riff-raff but the angelically turned out offspring of respectable bourgeois families.  In the lead roles Anne and Lore, Jeanne Goupil (the director's future wife and dependable muse) and Catherine Wagener are as compulsively engaging as they are remorselessly vile, and it is to the film's credit that neither girl loses our sympathies nor her delicate aura of gamine vulnerability, no matter how disgusting and depraved their demonically construed actions become.

Séria comes dangerously close to full-on child pornography in a few scenes but at no point does he overstep the mark, avoiding the self-serving excesses of the exploitation flicks of this era.  There are just enough flashes of unseemly eroticism to make us feel mildly queasy and remind ourselves what a dangerous and terrifying thing sex can be when it first gets a grip on the adolescent mind.  The film's most shocking scene is not the vicious murder that seals the heroine's mutual fate, nor the fiery denouement that momentarily chills the blood of the spectator, but two earlier ones in which a fully grown adult male throws himself on one of the girls and we watch helplessly as the sad pathetic creature struggles in vain to thwart an impending rape.  Séria presents these assaults in the coldly dispassionate manner of a wildlife documentary, depicting nature at its reddest in tooth and claw.

The deeds that make up this infernal litany of evil may be monstrous - what can be more disgusting than an angelic little girl delighting in the misery she can inflict on others? - but Séria leaves us in no doubt that the real evil lies not in these two  misguided misfits, but in a warped and even more repellent society that seeks to hide its crimes and hypocrisies beneath a thin veil of deceit and forced piety.  Notice the libidinous smirks plastered all over the transfixed faces of the church congregation as a priest delivers a sermon attacking the sins of the flesh, his words inspiring not thoughts of abstinence but sordid recollection of carnal delights already enjoyed.  How readily do the unknowing parents applaud the girls' recital of Baudelaire's La Mort des Amants at the climax of the film - if only they had understood the poem's meaning the tragic conclusion would have been all too readily anticipated,

Film Synopsis

Anne de Boissy and Lore Fournier are the best of friends.  Both come from respectable bourgeois families and they share the same propensity for mischief-making at the strict convent school where they are reluctant boarders.  Despite their young age - both are barely into their teens - they are sexually precocious and nurture a morbid obsession with sex and death.  During the long summer vacation, with her parents away on holiday, Anne invites Lore to stay with her at her large country estate.  Rebelling against their Catholic indoctrination, the two girls enact increasingly wicked pranks to assert their independence and veneration of evil.  Their principal victim is Émile, a cow farmer, who succumbs too easily to their flagrant flirtations.  To punish this unfortunate after his clumsy attempt to rape Lore, the two friends call at his farm one night and set fire to the hayricks.

An even crueller 'chastisement' is devised for Léon, a mentally deficient forty-something who works at the girls' school as an odd-job man: the little pet birds he cherishes are slain and his meagre possessions are destroyed.  Neither Anne nor Lore is troubled by conscience or fear of discovery, until the fateful night when they lure a stranded motorist back to Anne's private den at her parents' chateau.  Unable to resist the two nubile teens as they strip down to their underwear, the motorist throws himself onto Lore, and is beaten to death by Anne in a desperate attempt to prevent her friend from being raped.  Disposing of the man's bulky corpse proves to be an easy task.  Living with the consequences of killing a human being proves to be a much greater challenge.  Fearing the police are on to them, the girls decide there is but one way out if they are to avoid being separated forever.  Only in Hell will they find the rewards they seek...