The Name Of The Rose [1986] [VHS] [1987]

Adapted from Umberto Eco, s award winning wordy novel The Name of the Rose is a sombre gloomy thriller set in a Benedictine Abbey high in the Italian Appennino Mountains during the 14th century.
Told from the perspective of a now elderly Azdo of Melk who narrates part of the script, we learn he was once a gauche apprentice to Brother William of Baskerville (A sly nod to Conan Doyle surely.), an erudite Franciscan Monk with highly developed powers of deductive reasoning. This Medieval Crackers singular talent is called upon when after arriving at the forbidding Abbey to attend a Seminary on "Wether or not Christ owned his own clothes?" a series of bizarre murders occur. The Head of the Abbey Father Abbot, played by a sibilantly murmuring and creepy Michael Lonsdale, asks Baskerville to discreetly investigate before the arrival of the Inquisitor Gui who has a nasty habit of torturing and burning ostensibly innocent people. Baskerville, wonderfully portrayed by Sean Connery as a man of considerable learning with a penchant for sudden outbursts of almost childlike enthusiasm, dispenses the benefit of his perceptive analysis of the situation to his eager charge who in turn has his head turned by a feral but attractive girl who scrounges for scraps of food disposed of by the well tended brothers. Christian Slater forgoes his vanity to play the young Adzo complete with Peter Beardsley bowl cut and the requisite bald patch and is suitably wide eyed with wonder one minute and intimidated the next.
The film starts out as an intriguing whodunnit but with the arrival of the sadistic Gui the tone suddenly turns darker as he targets the unfortunate girl and a mentally challenged Brother (Ron Perlman..superb) because they haven't the means to defend themselves, naturally much to the consternation of Baskerville.
This is a superb atmospheric movie. The Monastery is a suitably bleak and labyrinthine, it radiates hidden frigid menace and the Brothers are a truly bizarre collection of individuals, like a meeting of Terry Gilliam grotesques. Connery has stated he was never as cold on a film set as he was during the filming of The Name of the Rose and you can tell. The acting is all spot on and the direction by Jean Jacques Anaud lets the story flow in a naturalistic unfussy manner. The ending is touching in a subtle almost poetic way
It's terrific that a film as individual and compelling as this is at last being released on DVD and hopefully more will follow. Can I request through these pages the immediate release of "To Live and Die in L.A."? "Hardware", "Talk Radio" and "Scandal". But for now those of us with a love for films that eschew the formulaic Hollywood norm this is a must have five star release,

Bit of an oddity, this filmed version of the 14th Century whodunnit written by Umberto Eco (Travels In Hyper-reality, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island Of The Day Before), University of Bologna Professor of Semiotics (a disputed 'scientific branch of philosophy' first posited by Ferdinand de Saussure). A pan-European co-production, "Curious, remote, randomly developed and edited, [...] can never have been an obvious candidate for box-office success: yet it did pretty well."

Both moody and gloomy (there is very little daylight throughout the film), it is more or less narrated by a mature Adzo of Melk, who as a young Franciscan noviciate (Christian Slater) accompanies John of Baskerville (Sean Connery; Oscar-nominated for Best Actor) to an isolated Benedictine abbey high in the bleak northern Italian Appennino mountains to engage, along with delegates from other monastic Orders, in discourse upon "whether or not Christ owned his own clothes." [Believe it or not, such scholastic debate was not uncommon at the time. A century later, upon the onset of the Renaissance, another profound debate occurred when artists considered whether or not Adam should be depicted with a navel ... or not ...].

Unfortunately, whilst there, the second in a spate of mysterious - and 'prophesized,' of course - deaths occurs, prompting the Benedictine Father Abbot (the ever soft-spoken Michael Lonsdale) to ask John of Baskerville to - discreetely, of course - apply his known gift of deductive suppositioning to explain these deaths, before the feared Inquisitor Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham) arrives and starts burning people. Applying Socratic reason and dropping witticisms and bon mots to his young charge, John of Baskerville (is the Doylean name significant, one wonders!) pokes around the incredible squalour of every-day monastic life (the abbey makes the Bates Motel seem idyllic), in the face of mounting scepticism (Gui produces a simple local girl with a black cat - 'clear proof' surely of satanic possession, demonic skulduggery and Whore of Babylon guilt!), until the mystery is unravelled.

NOTE: unregarded by general opinion, the Papal Inquisition, granted by Pope Gregorius IX in 1231 to 'inquisitors' drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, existed long before both the better-known Spanish Inquisition [1479] and the fanatical Societá de Jesu, the Society of Jesus (or Jesuit Order) [1534-40], came into being. It authorized the auto da fé ('act of faith') burnings at the stake usually associated with the Spanish Inquisition.

This film is one of those that stands out to me as Connery at his best ... and also not Connery. Typically in his films he's a dominant, hero, who charges forth to save the day. In Name of the Rose he's reserved, humble and most importantly he's not Connery. Although a mystery this film handles human nature, explores the role of the church in developing (Or in this case not developeing) the western world, examines sexuality and by and large is a wonderful piece of cinema.

With todays films being manufactured to carefully examined research on what viewers want, it's these older films that were crafted for love of story and picture that stand out for me. Name of the Rose is superbly shot, with breathtaking accuracy. One feels cold, isolated, muddy, and in a different world. Christian Slatter makes his film debut as the novice and to my mind really shows us that he is one hot actor.

All in all Name of the Rose is one for the collection, to be watched and appreciated as a solid piece of film making.

I highly recommend it.