I Would Like to See It: The Devils

“Hearts that ought to burn with the fires of passion are merely dead with the gray ashes of convenience,” drones sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) to the young Madeline de Brou (Gemma Jones) upon the submission of the latter for membership in the local Ursuline convent. It comes at the end of a droll spiel on the reasons women wind up in such cloistered spaces: lack of a dowry, ugliness, and simple bad timing consign entire generations of second and third daughters to enclosed orders. It is logistics, not divine will or any human principle of kindness or service, which helms the fate of the helpless. Throughout Russell’s famously controversial film we see the oppressed and rejected struggle to escape their circumstances. Sister Jeanne begging God to remove her deformity, Grandier (Oliver Reed) placing himself between the two-headed giant of church and state and the fragile independence of the city of Loudun — desire and humane principle are positioned as intrinsically antithetical to the state’s hierarchical institutions.

Production designer Derek Jarman’s sets emphasize this contrast in the loudest visual language imaginable. His city feels like an asylum. His convent is intended to echo a public bathroom, a place where effluvia swirls for a few pathetic moments before vanishing down the drain, while our glimpse of Louis XIII’s (Graham Armitage) palace centers mostly on the opening sequence’s heavily homoreroticized live production of ‘The Birth of Venus’ by the king himself, a reminder that for royalty desire and circumstance are one and the same. The Devils shows us a world shaped in every respect by cruelty, neglect, and convenience. Even in sister Jeanne’s body this same struggle plays out, her sexual fantasies of blasphemous coupling with Grandier-as-Christ veering into a battle with her own self-image as faceless crowds mock her deformed spine while she cries out in protest that she’s beautiful, she’s beautiful. Circumstance and sentiment, locked in mortal combat. It echoes again through Grandier wrestling with his lustful compulsions and his desire to find God in his own way, through marriage even as a priest.

Russell’s interest in the intrinsic divinity of human connection as a force opposed to the corrupt earthly institution of the Catholic Church is inextricable from his devout Catholic faith. He lays out two paths for God’s adherents, one of mortification of the flesh leading to ever greater cognitive and moral distortion as desire, termed sin, becomes wedded forever to sensory excitation via flagellation. The second path is that of the heretic, striking off the beaten track and attempting to find one’s way to God through love, through striving, through the treatment of living, changeable scripture and love of God as primary against the church’s secondary backdrop. Again, the needs of flesh — to be loved, to be comforted, to have both community and independence — make war against the unnatural impositions of governance. If Russell left his dichotomy there, perhaps The Devils would have faded into another obscene curiosity, but the director’s decision to position human attempts at bettering society as fundamentally fragile and ineffectual, a leap of faith straight into a holocaust, made it instead the single greatest piece of Catholic art ever committed to film.