2012 Film Challenge #4: Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus is a British film from 1947, written and directed by the filmmaking team of William Powell and Emeric Pressburger and based on a novel written eight years earlier by Rumer Godden. Though the title has an artsy-intellectual sound to it (before I saw it I always had it confused with Camus's Black Orpheus), the storytelling is pretty straightforward. "Black Narcissus" is just the name of a perfume mentioned in the film, but of course whether there is any greater meaning beyond that is up to the viewer. 


The plot of the film centers on Sister Clodagh, a sister of the Convent of the Order of the Servants of Mary of Calcutta—beautiful & headstrong, natch—who despite her young age is tasked with heading up a new mission deep in the Himalayan mountains; they are to provide education and medicine to the local Indian people, and of course to convert them to Christianity if time permits. 

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Yeah yeah yeah, nuns, 1947. I know how this plays out: standard-issue fish-out-of-water story. The nuns don't understand the locals, the locals don't trust the nuns, both sides are a little arrogant and stuffy. Then there's a common crisis, the two sides have to come together to overcome adversity, and with hard work and a pinch of God's love everyone learns a lesson about getting along. We're out in an hour forty-five and everyone's uplifted. The end." 


Ha ha ha! No. Not even close.

Black Narcissus is not an uplifting movie, though neither is it a depressing or "serious" movie, and truth to tell it's not even a particularly Christian movie. It does deal with spirituality, however, or maybe better to say that it deals with the conflict between our ideals and our animal nature—our intellect versus our emotions, our compassion verus our neediness, the world as it should be versus the world as it actually is. 


The sisters soon find out that the convent donated to them by the local rajah was formerly the residence of the harem of his father, a place known as "The Palace of Women." It is a strange, forbidding compound halfway up the face of a cliff, a place where the air is "too pure" and the water "too good," a place where the wind always blows and the rooms seem to be haunted by the lushness of days gone by. High above them on a peak sits the Indian holy man, one who was once a creature of the world but who now neither moves nor speaks, while beneath them is the valley teeming with life and the ordinary people—particularly Mr. Dean, the rugged, handsome, irreverent and occsaionally shirtless British agent. 

The sisters find themselves suspended between these two extremes in a strange, isolated otherworld that slowly begins to affect them in ways they can't control. Thrust upon them are a half-mad caretaker who used to serve the harem girls, a young noble dressed like a dandy, and an orphaned teenage girl spilling over with sensuality. Meanwhile, Sister Clodagh is visited by memories of her past, while the high-strung sister Ruth gets a little squirrelly.


Whatever you're expecting, the film is probably not that. Perhaps most surprising to those who pay attention will be the perverse sense of humor that pervades it; again and again it seems as though the film is leading you towards a cliché only to grab your nose and twist it hard. Meanwhile the rascally Mr. Dean has a habit of scandalizing Sister Clodagh with comments which, if taken at face value, could be piously quoted in a Sunday sermon. Back in real life, the Catholic Order of Decency actually requested that scenes showing Sister Clodagh's life before the taking of her vows be cut out, no doubt because they are filled with a vitality and beauty that bleach her present pale by comparison; and yet they are scenes that portray only a beautiful, simple innocence. Only Black Narcissus could make the church want to censor such G-rated material!


In the end what's remarkable about the movie is that it throws us and the nuns in the same boat: we all have our preconceived notions of how things are going to go in this story, but we are all presented with something much, much more complicated and weird, and both we and Sister Clodagh have to stumble through and make sense of it all. 


How did it hold up? Well, I think a sign of a great movie is that every time you watch it you find something new you didn't see before, and this time around there was a short simple moment towards the end that made me think "holy crap, life really is like that, isn't it?" Maybe that sounds a little James Lipton-y, but what are ya gonna do. 


Netflixxable? Yes to both disc and streaming.