Melissa Leo stars in a scene from the movie "Novitiate." The Catholic News Service classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. Photo: CNS Even as their numbers continue to decline in most jurisdictions, nuns, as in cloistered contemplatives, and religious sisters in the active congregations, continue to attract, bemuse, fascinate, confound and even repel observers from both within and outside the Catholic orbit.
Various documentaries on the ‘religious’ calling of women by the BBC and other networks, the Spanish for instance, have generated very favourable responses and wide public interest. ‘Live-in’ experiences in a convent may strike the seasoned Catholic as cynical but public reactions have been highly positive.
Films and televisions series about Catholic and Anglican sisters have been plentiful – think of the estimable Call the Midwife as well as past series like Body and Soul, In this House of Brede and of films like the storied American The Nun’s Story and the brilliant Polish film Ida.
There, of course, have been countless comedic films, sitcoms, reality shows, exposés, documentaries and cameo portraits. If nuns are a disappearing act – in fact, they are not – then one can only be puzzled by their staying power in the public imagination.
They are often a bellwether of Catholic institutional life and an inexhaustible source of wider curiosity.
They have also been the focus of severe judgement, and sometimes the sole scapegoat, of egregious wrongs: residential schools for indigenous children, the Magdalene Laundries, etc. To be a nun must sometimes feel like being at the centre of swirling opinions and controversies – anything but the stilled life contemplatives ardently seek.
And, then, lamentably there is the recently released US film by director/writer Maggie Betts, Novitiate. This is a work of stunning ineptitude: misguided casting, formulaic cinematography and poor direction resulting in stereotypical posturing and a script riddled with inaccuracies.
How can you take seriously a text that has an archbishop who can’t grasp the semantic and existential difference between a novice and a novitiate, a mother abbess who is a variant of the Beast of Belsen, postulants and novices primed for grim psychotherapy and ignorant of anything theological, and all of this taking place in a cauldron of seething libido?
In a brief conversation recorded in the Talk about Town section of the New Yorker Betts identifies the source of inspiration for her movie. “It was a collection of Mother Teresa’s letters. They were obsessive about her love for her husband and I was thoroughly confused until I realised they were about God, and she was in so much pain because he had abandoned her for long periods across 30 or 40 years.
“Mother Teresa spent her life torturing herself and I and so many of my girlfriends also got into that dynamic with men of ‘how do I make him love me?’”
Taking the notion of a nun as the bride of Christ literally, enveloping it in the direct experience of her own and her friends’ love lives, she can only conclude that convent life is a misplaced life, riven by sexual confusion, repressive, an ugly mirror of patriarchal structures, and a prison to escape.
Betts, who is not Catholic and appears to have only the sketchiest grasp of what consecrated life is, has her fictitious congregation of cloistered repressives roiled by the Second Vatican Council, poised to empty itself of its loveless inmates, erupting in a new and dangerous freedom.
It’s all tripe, replete with sad caricatures, a sad script, and an incomprehensible ending. It is what happens when a script is written to a thesis built on shoddy work.
The ascetic life is worth exploring, apophatic spirituality is a mystery worth probing and cloistered life is a subject of legitimate inquiry, artistic and sociological. And even when nuns and sisters are treated synonymously – and that is an historical and canonical mistake – much good can come from an enfleshed portrait that is not fearful of subverting pious conventions.
But Novitiate fails by every standard.
Visit Michael W. Higgins’ blog, Pontifex Minimus: http://sacredheartuniversity.typepad.com/pontifexminimus/