For this writer, the idea of nuns cavorting around their convent and giving in to their sensual desires should have been a home run. This should have been the perfect film for this set of eyeballs. That this film’s infamous creator, Walerian Borowczyk, was also championed by Terry Gilliam should have only cemented things. A film that should have been right up my alley.
Alas Behind Convent Walls is a slow and sometimes turgid affair. It starts brightly with a heap of amusing suggestive dialogue coming in early. This may be because the translation of language may have allowed it to become cheekier.
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Behind Convent Walls is also a gorgeous film to look at. The visuals are playful, while the location is delicately captured and beautifully lit by the Italian sun. At no point does the film feel ugly to look at. Arrow Video has also dutifully mastered and cleaned up the print. This makes the film even more handsome. For a director whose late career had him dismissed as an artful pornographer, it is evident that Behind Covent Walls has more going on in its blocking and framing than mere explicit titillation. The film suggests it has something substantial to say.
However, whatever that message may be, it gets lost within a thin narrative and equally slim characters. The film’s main plot of a mother superior struggling to reign in her wayward convent could have been entertaining if it bothered to explore things further. Instead Behind Convent Walls flitters between erotic sexual sequences and a rather unengaging story. It’s perhaps aspects like this which allowed critics to dismiss Borowczyk as a mere pornographer.
In the Blu-ray extras, film critic Virginie Selavy makes thematic connections between the earlier works of Borowczyk and the more sexual entries of his latter filmography. She briefly notes how critics quickly dismissed Borowczyk once his movies became more carnal. Yet the problem with Behind Convent Walls is that the film isn’t as engaging as it perceives itself. It’s difficult to pick something like this over Black Narcissus (1947) or The Devils (1971) if one is looking for films which blend repression with religion.
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In addition, the film is too knowing and artful to be a simple nunsploitation flick. The film is erotic and explicit, but it’s by no means tacky or cheap in its depictions of sex. Interestingly, one of the film’s key sexual sequences holds a shot reminiscent of the main conceit found on the adult erotic website ‘Beautiful Agony’ (2003). Whether Borowczyk inspired this is perhaps doubtful.
It is fascinating to see the provocations that filmmakers were allowed to get away with. Especially at this time in which audiences appear so polarised that they are equally more chaste and more sexually fluid at the same time. Behind Convent Walls has fewer pretensions over the entries of modern-day enfant terrible and could provide some eyebrow-raising reactions to a modern-day audience. However, whether they’re willing to trudge through a muddy 90-minute narrative is a very different story.
Behind Convent Walls is out on Limited Edition Blu-ray on 29th April from Arrow Video.
