Saturday, March 17, 2018

Novitiate (2017): a movie with some damn hot nuns


For a change let's talk about a last year movie I really really like: Novitiate, written and directed by a ladybird... by the name of... Maggie Betts. That's it!

I was expecting kind of a melodrama, and a really fucking boring one, because nuns, right?... but no, the movie is very straightforward, very honest and keeps you on the edge of your sit, the whooole trip.

It's about a girl that wants to become a nun, so first she has to pass like a 2 year trial period called the novitiate.
And is set right about that time, 1962, when the Vatican II was release. The Vatican II - please don't confuse it with the Vatican I - Was a council called by the pope John XXIII, with the objective of kind of modernizing the Church. There were some practices that came all the way from the middle ages (like the penance cilice in your ass thing-u? The one that, that albino leprechaun use on The da Vinci Code?), so they forbid some things and adapt others (and it all remained basically the same, right?, the mass is made now in vernacular languages




(Which is stupid in my opinion, at the very least you were learning something...the language of Virgil and Catullus, you know?)

The priest facing the audience during the mass... uhmm... I think the Holy Inquisition was disbanded too? And Torquemada judge and found guilty!

And of course, the more traditional factions of the Church didn't take this kindly (I think they killed John XXIII,  The "Good Pope", like a month or so he was invested? Actually I think he didn't really have time to be a "Bad Pope", right? The Godfather 3 shows all these. They poisoned his tea or something?)

So yeah, that's the Whole plot of the movie, she wants to become a nun, but the whole nun-thing is changing.

Let me tell you, the movie villain - sort of - is The mother superior of the convent (Melissa Leo), she's like a real bitch with the novices
and resist the changes. So is THAT character, but a great villain, because you can totally understand where she comes from. This is like the only thing she's known her whole life (she's been inside that damn convent last 40 years!!!), love as a sacrifice, as self-inflicted pain, as peaceful humble silence, as silice in your ass.


And now those cocksuckers!!! Are taking it away from her!




Not only that, you feel for her, you feel her pain. For the villain! Is awesome. She really feels betrayed by the Church, and blames JesusChrist Almighty himself for letting this changes to happen.

In one marvelous scene she's praying and crying:
"Where are you? I can feel you, right next to me, for so long.
With me all that time, my darling husband.
And now you've abandoned me.
And you hoped that I would lose faith in you?
You imagined that I would just walk out those gates?
I cannot. I made a commitment forty years ago.
And even if you choose to turn your light from me forever...
I am yours."

Damn! Like Damn! My darling husband... and there's something intimate in the way she performs all this.., Is like the sweet recrimination of the loving Wife to the cheating husband.


The mother, I mean the actual biological mother, is the weak spot... 
I've seen that bitch before in some minor movie... and Law and Order; I think she was fine there...
So I'd say underwritten.
She's an atheist but still take her daughter to a mass? Because, she's letting her "decide" when she grows up (Did she take her to eat Harikrishna pretzels next?...)
I mean you believe or you don't. If you think this is all silliness and a scam, Why would you take her there? It's so fucking stupid.

And then when she finds out her daughter's decision she ask herself: "What did I do wrooong?" Well lady, putting
her in a fucking nun school, for start.
  
And yeah, like I said is a very honest movie. These girls - the novices I mean- they're not just some virgin wackos that want to throw away their young precious lives. They really feel they have been called. They think they're in love with God. 
They really think they're becoming the wives of Christ.




In the novitiate ceremony they even made them dress in white wedding garments, fCs!!! And in a very childish manner after the wedding they dance around the fire, like in some pagan cult shit, singing and laughing: We're married. We're married!!! (like annoying kids)
Which reminded me the ending of another movie?




And maybe in real life they do, I mean becoming the Wives of God... Not in this movie though. The movie is like kind of atheist...Well that's a bit strong... At least Anti-Clericalist.

I'd say it's a movie that's trying to depict the big crisis in faith, that modern times, or more precise '62 brought to Catholicism. 

All our protagonist want is to be special to God 
(Not "special" like "we all are"...
But rather something unique... not like the rest of us losers.)

That's why she wants to become a nun. But she's so young, right?!
And yeah... I mean when you are young you have all this like crazy ideas of becoming a saint, and devote yourself to being perfect, and love all humanity... But then, one magical day your underwear
start to tickle... and you found yourself knocking 2 a.m. in the morning on some ugly chick's door begging her to comfort you, right?  
  
How could she make that decision?!!! She knows nothing about life, or like pervert Dr Freud used to say "sweet sweet Sexualität".

She knows nothing about boys... or girls...

And there you have it... The best scene in the whole picture. You got like two almost-nuns fucking each other! I was like: Daaamn!




(I tell you this much, We've come a loooong way since the days of Black Narcissus lipstick, right?! In a sentence this movie becomes like Black Narcissus, but without the Himalayas thing and there's no David Farrar in tight short pants either. And you got a sweet delights of Lesbos scene)

But like she says when she is confessing in the circle of trust... something like: "It cannot be a sin if it felt so right down there"


At least that's how I'll remember it.