The Convent

The Convent – Manuel de Oliveira’s 1995 The Convent will please no one. Therefore, I suppose, it’s my obligation to say a word in favor of this deeply strange film. Pre-dating The DaVinci Code by eight years, the film curiously anticipates some of its themes. In fact, when I watched the movie, I had the distinct impression that de Oliveira had secured financing for the movie by making the “pitch” that he was producing something in a similar vein. Now that I understand that The Convent antedates the Dan Brown thriller by eight years, the movie seems even more inexplicable. The Convent is shot like a horror film and features a screeching atonal soundtrack, mostly late Stravinsky and sacred work by Sofia Guibaidulina. The picture is designed as an occult thriller although it has no thrills to speak of and nothing actually occult ever happens. John Malkovich plays an American scholar who has come to Portugal to research a theory that seems overtly crazy – Malkovich wants to prove that a certain 16th century Portuguese Jew, Jacques Perez, is, in fact, Shakespeare. For some reason, proof of this hypothesis is supposedly hidden in the ancient manuscripts concealed within a crumbling monastic library – in some ways, the precursor to the book may be Eco’s The Name of the Rose. As it happens, Malkovich’s quest is a pure MacGuffin – it has nothing to do with the plot and is merely a way to explain why Malkovich, with his beautiful, disgruntled wife (played by Catherine Deneuve), isolates himself in the sinister, picturesque monastery where the film’s (in)action takes place. De Oliveira’s Malkovich turns out to be a version of Dr. Faustus. The monastery’s caretaker, Baltar, is Mephistopheles and the movie concerns Baltar’s efforts to tempt the scholar and seduce his frustrated wife. Leonor Silveira lends her unearthly beauty to the film playing a research assistant at the deserted monastery. She is also apparently a good angel, or one who has been touched by a good angel, and, seemingly, Baltar’s nemesis. (Leonor Silveira is one of film’s great beauties – she was de Oliveira’s muse in the movie that is apparently his most important work, Abraham’s Valley; and has an unsettling, ethereal glamour that, somehow, makes her seem as frightening as most Hollywood movie monsters.) Nothing much happens in the film. We get a tour of the monastery, some theological dialogues with recitations from Goethe’s Faust, and a number of extraordinary and eerie landscapes. In the end, Baltar and Silva’s character, called Piedade, confront one another in the depths of moss-draped forest. Malkovich, who has been tempted by Piedade, returns to his wife, who emerges like Aphrodite from stony waters of the sea-coast – another weird and spectacular landscape. De Oliveira doesn’t seem to take his spooky material seriously – her stages awkward scenes that can only be construed as strange jokes: Malkovich gnawing on a package that Piedade has gift-wrapped and given him (it contains a Penguin edition of Faust, Part II), a grizzled fisherman watching the denoument on the beach – he stands right beside Malkovich and near the place where the apparently nude, Catherine Deneuve emerges from the water, but neither one of them notice him. (He is a relative to the various yokels who appear in de Oliveira’s other films to witness the action from afar and make enigmatic or baffled remarks on what they see – for instance, the vineyard workers in The Strange Story of Angelica or the butler in Abraham’s Valley who confesses his helpless love for the female protagonist that he has watched throughout the film.) Oliveira was a surrealist and he has kept faith with the artistic movement with which he identified as a young man. Nothing in the film is impossible or, even, improbable, but everything is slightly askew; the camera angles are uncommunicative and the character’s look – for want of a better word – really, really “strange”. We seem them staring at things that we can’t see and the effect is deeply disquieting. The film is very beautiful, but odd – in one shot, we see a land rover moving through the depths of an enormous ancient forest – the scale seems “off”: either the trees are much too large or the land rover is too small. The film seems to have been shot in English and French and the subtitles often don’t make much sense – for instance, in the last title, we are told that the confrontation of Baltar and Piedade resulted in a conflagration destroying the “Jurassic remnants.” I have no idea what this means. The English is no clearer. Malkovich notes that one of the qualities of Helen of Troy was “ubiquity” but, then, seems to refer to that word in a way to mean something other than what I think the word means. I like this picture, however, because it is actually and genuinely eerie and I can’t say exactly why. (As an example of the film’s peculiarity: in an opening scene, Malkovich and his wife go to a monastery, enter, examine the dome in the crumbling church, and, then, leave, concluding the five minute scene by saying: “It’s the wrong monastery.”)