Truth in a Maze of Information

This week's exceptionally existential new Doctor Who, "Extremis", tackled the meaning of individual endeavour in a potentially meaningless world. Last week, the show tackled capitalism and this week has gone on to religion, using the Catholic Church as a context but addressing the more universal function of belief. It turned out to be a really lovely episode and featured possibly the most profound statement ever conceived about Super Mario Brothers.

Spoilers after the screenshot

I was saying to a friend of mine a few months ago, Professor Peter Herman at SDSU, that some piece of dystopian fiction seemed prophetic now that Trump is in office and Professor Herman replied, "Everything bad seems prophetic now." I thought of this watching "Extremis", in the scene where Bill (Peal Mackie) finds the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) sitting alone in the White House Oval Office with the corpse of a president who's just killed himself.

Of course, this whole season of Doctor Who was recorded before last year's U.S. election and even if the makers of the show knew who was going to be president they likely desired to avoid any of the attendant trouble in suggesting someone very like the actual president committed suicide. That's probably why the president on the show resembles neither Trump or Clinton, a nondescript white man with black hair. Though the level of intellectual contemplation suggested as a motive for suicide would also rule out Trump. But the story of a world where the truth can't be known because of the sophistication of the lies that shape apparent reality, paired with a portrayal of the U.S. government, couldn't fail to seem like an apt reflection of current affairs.

Which makes the Doctor's solution all the more resonant, the beautifully delivered concept of virtue without hope--reminding me of the line from Aragorn in Return of the King, about "valour without renown." It would be easy to compare "Extremis" to The Matrix but its idea is much more humanistic than a story about a regular guy who ends up being the Chosen One--in this episode, the Doctor discovers he isn't even really the Doctor, in fact not even a real person, and he presents the argument that it doesn't matter because he's defined by his actions. This is also not an idea new to this story--not new to television or even new to Doctor Who but it was beautifully delivered here. I particularly liked the pairing of it with the Catholic Church, emphasising the nature of the question as being an ancient preoccupation of the human mind worth exploring again and again. The bad times which prompt such questions and make them seem particularly crucial, after all, keep popping up.

I loved how the Doctor's epiphany at the climax came in the form of words spoken to him by Missy (Michelle Gomez) when she was in fact repeating words he'd spoken to her. It's even better because we know she probably doesn't mean them, forcing us to analyse the value in the words themselves--there's no hope she believes in deeds done with promise of "no hope."

The Doctor's blindness was another perfect device for this story, the idea of this blind man trying to read a deadly book called "the truth" being a clever metaphorical portrayal of what the process of seeking truth might be--and Capaldi does such a beautiful job allowing the despair to come through which he's fighting against.

Pearl Mackie continues to be good but this episode particularly drew my attention to Matt Lucas. I knew he could be funny but here he was also excellent delivering some straight forward sincere stuff. His dread approaching the edge of the projectors was great.

And I'm going to make a prediction right now--I think these hooded guys are the Cybermen. It makes sense that they'd be the ones to create a vast simulation of Earth--which isn't too far from the idea of Mondas being an alternate Earth. It looks like they're going to be in next week's episode, too, presumably outside the simulation but I still feel pretty strongly we're seeing Mondasians. To those who don't understand why the original Mondasian Cybermen are scarier, imagine those Cybermen look like this but with a thin cloth mask.

The Meaningless Score

Naturally, real life gangsters aren't generally very romantic figures, which might be easy to forget with even some movies that aim to be more realistic inevitably portraying them as charming underdogs. Which isn't necessarily bad--gangsters are people, too, after all, and may be as complicated as anyone else. But I am thankful now and then for a movie like "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's 1990 film 3-4X October (３－４Ｘ１０月, released in English speaking countries under the really dumb title Boiling Point). Here's a movie that leaves you with the impression that yakuza are chiefly ugly-spirited, frightening, and pathetic. It's a very cold, cruel film but has a laugh in almost every scene.

The title refers to a baseball game where we're introduced to the main characters at the beginning of the film, the title's irrelevance to what happens in the film a reflection of its nihilism, one of the reasons Boiling Point is not an appropriate title. As a title, Boiling Point suggests someone becomes violent after a slow build-up of circumstances but no-one really has that overrated thing called an arc in this film, except possibly the main character.

And with him it's hard to tell. We first see Masaki (Yurei Yanagi) expressionless in the almost total darkness of an outhouse, the first shot of the film, before we see that the outhouse is located on the edge of a baseball field. Masaki remains expressionless for almost the entire film and says little. He and some of the other players on one of the baseball teams work at a gas station and it's there the trouble begins when a gangster is angered when Masaki doesn't clean the hubcaps of his car quickly enough.

The manager of the baseball team is a former gangster and takes a personal interest in the matter. Masaki takes his and anyone else's advice unquestioningly. When he's told to find a girlfriend, he immediately asks out a nearby waitress, Sayaka (Yuriko Ishida), who happily becomes his girlfriend. They two seem well matched in that neither of them ever say very much. In one of the funnier scenes in the film, the two are riding a motorcycle when a car full of gangsters appears beside them, taunting them, before slamming into a parked car while Masaki and Sayaka ride on without exhibiting any reaction.

Eventually the manager gets in over his head and takes a beating from his former yakuza syndicate. He vows revenge and intends to go to Okinawa to buy a gun but, since he can barely move due to his injuries, Masaki and his friend Kazuo (Dankan) go instead. It's here that "Beat" Takeshi enters and steals his own film as one of the most impressively rendered psychopaths I've ever seen in a movie.

This sequence seems pretty clearly influenced by Blue Velvet and Takeshi seems intent on outdoing Frank Booth--and he does give him a run for his money, I have to say. Obviously Masaki is less emotionally vulnerable than Kyle MacLachlan's character but the way Takeshi's gangster character, Uehara, takes him under his wing for a chaotic ride with a few friends definitely feels like a version of what happens in Blue Velvet. Uehara displays a similar disregard for sexual boundaries that seems designed to humiliate people around him possibly to subjugate them or possibly just out of pure, idle sadism.

He compulsively rubs Kazuo's leg and genitals and then abruptly orders his right hand man to have sex with his girlfriend and cut off his own finger. Earlier in the film, we see the baseball manager giving the typical strong-arm tactic of the unanswerable question--asking a guy he has at his mercy to call him an insulting name. The point is to make the victim frantically try to figure out a way to respond that's not insulting, knowing there's not a right answer not really helping. Uehara takes it to another level through his manipulation of his friend and his girlfriend, whom he can't stop hitting for the rest of the film. She responds with angry words but seems bound to him somehow.

The film has a lot of references to other yakuza films and even one odd fishing sequence that seems to parody Yasujiro Ozu. Reminiscent of Ozu, throughout this film Takeshi shows a preference for low shots, though he tends to shoot from more of a distance than Ozu often puts a lot of empty space above the actors' heads. This is another of the many things that emphasises the characters' ineffectuality. In one strikingly emblematic scene, Masaki hits a home run after practising swinging his bat a long time only to lose the game for his team when he runs faster to home plate than his team mate ahead of him. No matter what he does, with however much effort, he's defeated by his misunderstanding of a basic rule.

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Behind a beige and golden mist they stood.
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Asbestos eyes pervade the penthouse scab.

A Bad Way to Travel

For an important message to all hitmen, see 1967's A Colt is My Passport (拳銃は俺のパスポート). That message; avoid finicky clients. The film's a simple story with some beautiful style and impressive, cleverly constructed action sequences.

A Colt is My Passport was directed by Takashi Nomura and not Seijun Suzuki despite starring Suzuki regular Joe Shishido and featuring cast members from Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter which had been released the previous year. The two films even have practically the same villain--Hideaki Esumi wearing the same enormous sunglasses.

The film begins with Shishido as hitman Shuji Kamimura accepting and carrying out a job from a yakuza boss to take out a rival yakuza boss. Shuji and his partner, Shun (Jerry Fujio), head for the airport afterwards but the rival syndicate and the cops both prevent the two from leaving. That's only the start of their troubles because afterwards they learn their client is angry because they didn't kill their target in precisely the right circumstances. So now everyone's after them.

For most of the film, the two guys in their crisp, cool suits lay low at a little dockside inn where a woman working there, Mina (Chitose Kobayashi), falls in love with them both.

The movie has a great soundtrack, mostly simple electric guitar reminiscent of Spaghetti Westerns. Like Tokyo Drifter, it has a lonesome musical number, performed by Shun.

Maybe this movie was an attempt by the studio to make a Seijun Suzuki movie but with all the weird stuff they hated taken out. Tokyo Drifter has plenty of cinematic and storytelling experimentation, A Colt is My Passport is a pretty straightforward story about handsome rogues ruled by a deeply felt sense of honour and the tender maiden whose heart they might break.

There are several well put together action sequences, though my favourite maybe isn't elaborate enough to be called an action sequence, just a simple, nicely understated shot of a stuntman jumping out of a car he sends into the bay.

Guardians of the Prismatic Spray

One thing's for sure, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies aren't among the many modern films that use a dull, blue and amber colour palette. In 2017's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, director James Gunn uses every colour in the rainbow, and then some, but manages to keep the riot of colour, characters, and effects in a tight enough bundle to make a very entertaining water balloon of enthusiastic post-modern affection.

My favourite parts of the film were the conversations between Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff). It seems the filmmakers sought to pair one big-hearted, simple-minded character with another, which doesn't seem like a concept that would have legs, yet their conversation about beauty was oddly thought provoking, despite the obvious joke in Drax's assertion that beautiful people can't trust anyone. Now the two seem to be on the path to a relationship in which physical repulsion is agreed on as a desirable concept. It's not exactly like Peter (Chris Pratt) compulsively talking about David Hasselhoff at the end of the film in order to mute some of the big emotional notes, but the landscape Mantis and Drax have created has something like the enthusiastically ironic appreciation for pop culture references that pervade much of the film in that there's a pursuit for earnest feeling through the destabilising of signifiers. I've been at university too long.

I was really jazzed to see Ben Browder's cameo. After seeing the first film, I noted how much it owes to the great Sci-Fi television series Browder starred, Farscape, in terms of tone. It seemed James Gunn was acknowledging the influence with this cameo, and I dig it. With Browder putting on that English accent, it seemed like Crichton posing as Peacekeeper.

When the first movie came out, I remember people commenting on how refreshing it was that Gamora (Zoe Saldana) didn't end up becoming Peter's love interest, which generally made me wonder if these people were watching the same movie I was. It seemed abundantly clear that they were intended to have an unspoken attraction, but I guess we needed this movie with Peter directly stating to Gamora than they shared an unspoken mutual attraction. This movie did a better job of having Gamora seem attracted to Peter, though--she can actually be seen checking him out early on. And is it really so strange? To quote John Cleese in Monty Python's Meaning of Life, what's wrong with a kiss? I've been disappointed by the lack of romance in the new Star Wars films and television series, I'm glad this apparently isn't something Disney's mandated for all its properties.

I still don't find Gamora all that interesting. Nebula (Karen Gillan) was a lot more fun and I enjoyed watching her try to sort her feelings out. It's a shame Gillan has to shave her head for these films, though, her hair is so fantastic. If Paul Goddard were the Farscape cameo the two could commiserate.

I read James Gunn made a point of making sure the movie passed the Bechdel Test many times. But he must have misunderstood the test, which requires that two or more named female characters have a conversation where they don't talk about a man. The Bechdel Test website can only find one brief instance in the film that passes and it's actually a conversation in which Peter, Drax, and Rocket (Bradley Cooper) take part.

Personally, I don't care if a movie passes the Bechdel test or not. As even proponents of the test have pointed out, there are many movies that don't pass while still having great female characters and many movies that do pass while lacking good female characters. But I'm a little intrigued that Gunn was so keen to pass the test but still managed to botch it almost completely. Oh, well. It happens to all of us.

The main plot of the film involves Peter's quest for a father figure with Kurt Russell's character, Ego, and Michael Rooker's Yondu being the contenders. The story explicitly involves creation and hierarchy. The movie begins with the crew doing a job for a race of beings who look down on everyone else for their belief in their own perfection, a concept which becomes a more serious concern for Peter later in the film. Again, this goes back to a digestion of the fundamental artistic motive of the film which celebrates a group of misfits and older movies and television series--like Farscape and Star Wars--that featured similar small groups butting heads with powerful beings and governments. One could look at Peter as Prince Hal choosing between the father figures King Henry IV and the morally weaker Falstaff. Though Yondu turns out to be a little too principled to be a genuine Falstaff. But the film is clearly happy to celebrate the fact that it's not the first to present a hero choosing between being a ruler or an ordinary mortal. Of course, no-one in this film is really an ordinary mortal, but still.

The Call of Saul

Another good episode of Better Call Saul last night, this one written by Ann Cherkis. The drug dealer subplot still isn't lighting my world on fire but it wasn't very annoying this time and fortunately there was plenty of Jimmy stuff.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Or should I call him Saul? I loved that commercial at the end, which felt very much like Bob Odenkirk in comedian mode--there was the young man from The Ben Stiller Show. I'm still a little disappointed by the retconning of "Saul Goodman"'s origin. It would feel weird now having Jimmy create the name as a cynical ploy to prey on Jewish stereotypes but that sleaziness was what we loved about him. By and large, though, this television series has improved the character.

Meanwhile, whatever Chuck's faults are, Michael McKean really made me want some of that scotch. Macallan isn't even my favourite brand. But he really sold enjoying the aroma before finally drinking.

I'd almost forgot about Nacho (Michael Mando) who's supposed to be a main character. If he's not in next week's episode, I'll probably forget him entirely. Last night he was moderately interesting, as were Gus and Hector. The show still hasn't given me anything to justify a prequel to their rivalry on Breaking Bad.

I'm guessing the show will finally tie Saul and Gus together by the end of the season. My prediction is Jimmy will be compelled to do some kind of legal work for Gus and uses the alias to avoid violating his suspension. I guess he can't be disbarred, though, considering he's practising law in Breaking Bad. There are a lot of reasons Breaking Bad takes tension out of Better Call Saul--we know Gus, Hector, Mike, and Saul are going to make it through the series, for instance, with only Hector really being scathed. That's partly why the show's at its best when Saul is being creatively criminal.

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The ice withheld the shorter tusk for men.
A dancing ray engulfed the glacier's brow.
Convinced, the sages tramped to arrow's den.
Amazement sorts the caller at the bow.
Intonations have told of callow climes.
Resolving copper cooled the state police.
In papers caught in spokes of wired times.
Evasion paints the sun on flared release.
In amber time the questions crack to pawn.
Adrenaline adroitly pumps the eye.
The crowd was blending with a single fawn.
Before the paper's blue it needs a dye.
A sandwich drips with pepper thoughts and cheese.
Continually the sky demands its fees.

American Snow

Last night's new American Gods was an improvement from last week's. It featured two vignettes unrelated to the main plot, both of which were better than the vignette from last week, and a less suspenseful but more satisfying development in the main plot.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Anubis (Chris Obi) taking the dead woman (Jacqueline Antaramian) up the endless fire escape was a cool image and concept. I wonder if they ran into David Niven on the way. And how like a cat to give its owner the last shove into the afterlife, though maybe it would've been more realistic for the cat constantly to remain on the threshold, forcing Anubis to keep the door open.

The vignette with the Ifrit (Mousa Kraish) and the down on his luck salesman (Omid Abtahi) was even better, following the cool Bilquis sex scenes to provide another fascinating visual mythology for orgasm. In this case, two beings seem to become one, literally.

Ian McShane and Cloris Leachman were nice together.

I guess I misremembered how the game with Czernobog (Peter Stormare) resolved--I thought it was the middle sister (Martha Kelly) who saved Shadow (Ricky Whittle) because he looked like the illustration on the cover of her romance novel. It's been too long since I read the book to remember if that was something that happened or not. I guess Shadow challenging him to another game was interesting. The scene on the rooftop where the youngest sister (Erika Kaar) demands a kiss from Shadow was pretty sweet.

Meanwhile, what a horrific episode of Kids in the Hall. What a shame Mad Sweeney's (Pablo Schrieber) bad luck rubbed off on guest star Scott Thompson.

Wednesday's (Ian McShane) grift was about as entertaining as it was in the book. Mainly the scene made me really want some hot cocoa.

Boss Arthur

Who ordered the gangster King Arthur who knows Kung Fu? Well that's what Guy Ritchie's delivered with 2017's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, featuring the fresh faced Charlie Hunnam as the famous rough and tumble brothel raised cockney of yore. I must admit, this ridiculous, perplexing creation is a lot of fun. At any rate, it's better than First Knight.

I could see Guy Ritchie directing a decent version of Oliver Twist one day. He certainly seems like he'd be more comfortable with the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes than he is with Percival or Bedivere. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, first of a planned six part film series unlikely to happen now considering this one's disastrous box office, feels for all the world like Ritchie's protest against the world that would force him to make a big budget sword and sorcery film.

It was like Ritchie burst into the Warner Brothers' office and said, "I got this great idea for a film about this hood named Artie and his pals Backlack and George--"

"You're doing a King Arthur film, Guy."

"As I was saying, this idea I have's about a king named Arthur and his pals Backlack and George . . ."

When the film is focusing on that crew, roaming about a preposterously Victorian Londinium, it's a lot of fun, deploying the layering of narratives of guys who take the piss telling stories that are cinematically illustrated. And why not? If the movie can have twenty storey war elephants, why not gangsters, too?

And it does have twenty storey war elephants. The first fifteen minutes of the film might well convince you there's nothing of value here because it's a muddled retread of the usual Lord of the Rings battle sequences with some 300 fast/slo-mo featuring the long lost Eric Bana as Uther Pendragon. What has Eric Bana been up to? He was so great in Hulk and Munich. Anyway, for all the poetry in Ritchie's editing of street guys telling stories, he does not have the chops to thread together a massive fantasy battle. Uther manages to get on top of an elephant alone to kill its master and then somehow gets out unscathed while everyone else dies--no idea how, the film just cuts to him standing on a battlement looking grim.

Ritchie draws on video games a lot, like Zack Snyder before him, and one can detect traces of Skyrim and God of War and the finale is right out of Soul Calibur. But the feeling that the rules are totally arbitrary isn't helped by the confusion created with the editing. When Ritchie is dealing with guys on the street, he seems to relax and make something more coherent, consequently making the plight of a minor child character in the middle of the film, and the distress over the potential loss of his parent, far more effective than Arthur witnessing the loss of his own parents at the beginning of the film. Ritchie makes the odd choice of having child Arthur's face be a total emotional blank, which is a bit eerie but also removes the viewer from emotional investment. This is exacerbated when the child's age in this one scene, repeatedly referred back to, seems to fluctuate between helpless infant and boy capable of tossing a sword.

Arthur's youth is shown in montage as his life in the brothel teaches him about scumbags. He learns slight of hand cons in alleyways and, yes, learns Kung Fu so he can protect the prostitutes from belligerent customers. But just because Arthur was raised by prostitutes, don't expect any of them to be a full fledged character or a mother figure. They remain throughout the film interchangeable pretty ladies there for Arthur to protect. In a way, I do like that the film doesn't have a token warrior lady (though this being after the time of Boudica that wouldn't be such an anachronism) and perhaps if Ritchie really feels uncomfortable writing female characters maybe it is best he avoids them almost entirely. But it is conspicuous. The only female character who becomes something like a personality is unnamed, referred simply as "the mage"--played by Astrid Berges-Frisbey with an intriguing, smouldering performance, she too mostly functions as a damsel in distress, except when she unleashes a power near the end that makes you ask, "Why didn't she do this a long time ago?"

Maybe they avoided a warrior woman because that drip, Gal Gadot, was featured as Wonder Woman in two trailers. Good grief, how much longer is Warners going to have money to burn? Well, again, I did have a lot of fun watching King Arthur, so I wouldn't say they're consistently making bad movies but, judging from King Arthur's box office, they are making consistently bad business decisions.

Costly Breath

I can think of few worthier targets for evisceration nowadays than capitalism. So to-day's new episode of Doctor Who, "Oxygen", filled me with much more glee than it might have in happier times. Written by Jamie Mathieson, who's quickly become one of the show's strongest writers since his first script for the show in 2014, delivers a deliciously sinister and timely premise with terrific atmosphere and character.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Poor Bill (Pearl Mackie) had a rough episode. But the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) giving her his helmet was one of those old fashioned lovely moments of heroism that still seem to work now and then. And now he's blind, too--still blind at the end of the episode, confirmed by the latest awkwardly looped piece of dialogue; "I'm still blind!" There is someone, I don't know who, responsible for these dopey insertions, usually at the end of episodes under the apparent belief that no-one's going to be able to put things together from the Doctor saying he can't look at Nardole. Hell, I started getting the idea when he kept the glasses on just a bit longer than seemed natural. If that still wasn't enough, there was the trailer for next week, after all.

Though, again, I mainly loved this episode. I do like to get my complaints out of the way first, generally speaking, but aside from that looped dialogue the only other thing that slightly bothered me was the banter about racism. It really does feel like there's a directive at work to discuss race as often as possible this season. Which is fine, but having the racism tables turned on Bill, so to speak, wasn't especially amusing or interesting.

But those suits. What a perfect concept--and that subtle joke I almost missed at the end--"It's the suits!" said the Doctor and I thought, "Yes, we know it's the suits--oh! Not those suits, the suits like the white collar bosses!" This works as a great follow up to "Thin Ice" where we saw the cutthroat capitalist in the 19th century. Now here's the invisible ruthless capitalist of the future, so gone over to machines that we never even see a flesh and bone villain. Just robots carting around the flesh and bone of the victims.

A suit you have to pay for every breath of oxygen, in a space station designed not to be hospitable to anyone not paying for that oxygen. You have to make money so you can pay money or you die. What a great reconfiguring of the intimate, personal impact of capitalism. I'm glad kids are watching this show because this is a great way to get them thinking about the world they're in. This is what good Science Fiction and Fantasy does.

The atmosphere of the story was great, I loved the slow build up as the characters discovered clues. I loved Nardole (Matt Lucas) who evidently needs oxygen. His pleas to the Doctor that they go back to the TARDIS were delivered just right. I loved the references to 2001: A Space Odyssey--the wonderful black void of space instead of thick star clusters at the beginning and the red eyes on the suits that are dead ringers for HAL.

Ever since the show's relaunch in 2005, there's been a compulsion to make the Doctor a Christ figure, something I don't always enjoy. This season I like it. The speech in "Thin Ice" which seems to be based on Matthew 25:40 ("Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.") and now we have the Doctor undermining capitalism by giving and sacrificing without thought of recompense. This is good stuff, especially with a lot of other fantasy fiction encouraging people to be ruthless and selfish. And I'm so going to miss Capaldi when he's gone, especially considering the latest casting rumours.

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The air pump showed the bird to ev'ry church.
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The thinning helmet held but little cash.
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The Flowers of Repression

No matter how you look at it, an entire convent losing their minds due to sexual frustration over a priest does not look good for the Catholic Church. But there are different ways fictional adaptations can address the infamous 17th century Loudun possessions. Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, based partly on a book by Aldous Huxley, would come across as a nihilistic depiction of human beings as compulsively beastly if it weren't for a particularly graceful performance from Oliver Reed as the victim and centre of the storm, Father Grandier. More entertaining spectacle than contemplative or horrific, the film is best described using Grandier's word in the film for the proceedings depicted; a circus.

The film opens with Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) straining to maintain equanimity while watching Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) perform as Venus in a decadent masque.

Meanwhile, Grandier is in charge of the walled town of Loudun which is currently beset by plague. Richelieu is in the process of having the King remove local authorities like Grandier in order to consolidate all ecclesiastical power in the Cardinal. But Richelieu can't budge the King on Grandier due to a promise the King made to the late governor.

The film makes it clear the 1630s were not a good time to be a Protestant in France--in one particularly memorable scene, the King uses Protestants dressed as crows for target practice--but another reason Grandier is a nuisance to Richelieu and his subordinates is his tolerance for Protestants, possibly because Grandier himself routinely breaks his vow of celibacy without the slightest sense of shame. This is one of the things that also drives Sister Jeanne of the Ursuline convent crazy.

She's played by Vanessa Redgrave, a fine performance but not as much of a stand out as you might expect. As Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), Richelieu's chief agent in the area, exploits the mad nuns to concoct a narrative about Grandier having a pact with Satan to possess the nuns, the antics of the supposedly possessed women and a witchhunter named Barre (Michael Gothard) easily surpass the court of Louis XIII in apparent hedonistic abandon, made all the more extreme for the hypocrisy involved which starts to look like method acting fetish role play.

This spectacle is the heart of the film and Russell gets many very striking images out of it. If it weren't for Reed's performance, there'd be little excitement left over for Grandier's scenes. That his persistent dignity in the face of all this remains captivating is a tribute to Reed. Much of his scenes later in the film bring to mind Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

But the broadness of the undisguised mercenary or loony quality of everyone else in the film prevents it from being an especially thoughtful examination of the incident. A better film tackling the topic is the great 1961 Polish film Mother Joan of the Angels which moves the action to Poland and takes place in the aftermath. It's a much eerier and troubling rumination on spiritual belief and commitment. But Russell's film is certainly a good time.