Sous Le Soleil De Satan (AKA Under Satan's Sun, AKA Under the Sun of Satan) [Masters of Cinema] [DVD] [1987]

Father Donissan(Depardieu) starts work as a priest in a new parish,feeling unworthy of the role,plagued by self-doubts.The director,Maurice Pialat,plays the canon, Megrou-Segrai,his superior.He reassures Donissan,that although he has not the same intelligenceand discipline,the Holy Spirit has a role for him,"the spirit of strength is within you".Donissan "must climb to where God sees you or be lost".Alone in his room,he beats himself with a chain,tortured by questions about his role in God's plan.He says he would rather be sent to a trappist monastery in a humbler role.He disapproves of the canon's laxity and indulgence while looking to him for mentoring.

Mouchette(Bonnaire) a young girl of 16,is aware of her power to attract wealthy and older men to desire her,she is pregnant and has argued with her parents and run away to her lover,a doctor and aristocrat, the Maquis de Cadigan. He will not perform the abortion or run away with her and he gives her money instead.He allows her to stay the night and he is fatally shot by her in the morning when she aims an(unknowingly)loaded shot-gun at him.She washes away the blood from her shoes in a stream.The death is taken as suicide.Themes of good vs.evil play out through these 2 characters,the hedonist and the ascetic,the priest a saint or fool, and the unloved young girl.

Meanwhile Megrou-Segrai dispatches Donissan to a neighbouring parish,Etaples,to assist a retiring priest with confession.Preferring to travel on foot across countryside,he loses himself and has an encounter with Satan,who leaves his stamp of hatred and psychic penetration,on him.Now possessed of the burden of spiritual insight,he encounters the wanton and aimless Mouchette,an instrument of mutual salvation.Heforcefully engages her in soul-baring self-evaluation.Later,so filled with self-loathing she slices her jugular with a razor-blade.Donissan takes her body to the altar,using an old ritual,until her parents claim the body.Donissan is reassigned to a monasterydue to his indiscretions.He is later asked by a father to help with a son dying of meningitis,who, having died is miraculously brought to life by Donissan,wondering if it was God or Satan who did it.Donissan dies later while taking confession back at the monastery.

For those who know this was based on a novel by Bernanos, as was Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette,both by Bresson. The themes in it call to mind Dreyer's Ordet.Piliat is an atheist losing his faith at age 14 but he finds in Bernanos a depth of spirituality worthy of Dostoevsky. His goal was to lay bare the interior motivations and feelings of his characters - the essence of a scene to him. To do that, the emotions needed to be fresh and authentic. To achieve that "proximity," Pialat worked within a more improvisational structure than virtually any other director. If a scene called for intense emotions, Pialat would first bully, torment, and physically threaten his performers until they were emotionally wrought so that the final product would reflect the "reality" of the intensity of the shoot. Pialat wanted an element of chaos and unpredictability in his films and used actors of intelligence who used instinct like Sandrine Bonnaire and Gerald Depardieu,using them in several of his films.You don't have to be religious to appreciate why this film won the Palm D'Or in Cannes 1987.The basic theme is whether it is God or Satan who rules the world.Piliat asks us to consider what is the essence of the human psyche or soul.The cinematography beautifully is attuned to the different characters.This is a great film and brought back into French cinema an underlying realism and search for truth.

This is a good film , not easy subject...the church and all that goes with it .When it was shown in Cannes festival many walked out.Often we don't want to see whats under our nose..
brilliant acting from Gerard Depardieu...

I found the characters underdeveloped, except for the most part, despicable. Not a lot to like here. "Sous Le Soleil De Satan," particularly pales in comparison to, "Diary of a Country Priest," by Bresson. Both stories have tormented priests who are mostly incompetent, counterproductive, or otherwise ineffectual, and both priests are lacking in empathy, but the developed humanness of Bresson's priest gives one reason to care about or feel sorry for him, something utterly lacking in Pialat's priest here. Bresson tells a good story, but Pialat seems to think that you can get a complete and ultrarealistic story by torturing the actors, when all you really get is tortured actors on film and not much story, and even less in the way of insight. A ham-handed, haphazard way to get interesting truths out on the screen, and it shows.

The only other thing I've seen by Pialat was, "Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble," and there too, I found the characters mostly just despicable. Noone I would ever be interested in hanging out with, nor like anyone I've ever come to know, or have any reason to care the slightest about. And even if I was interested in understanding how such jerks behave, there's not even much of that to be found, since there is really no insights at all as to why they're jerks.