Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Sight & Sound Challenge: Black Narcissus (1947)

Film: Black Narcissus (43/250) 
Critics Poll: 154th
Directors Poll: 132nd
First Time/Rewatch: Rewatch 

Nuns gone wild! I love films with unexplained madness. I love it even better when the crazy ones are nuns, and it's filmed in gorgeous Technicolor with beautiful matte paintings and it's set in India and the costumes are gorgeous and everything is so very pretty. Okay, so maybe that's a very specific type of film, but I don't care. This is a Powell & Pressburger film, which basically means that it's going to be one of the most stunning films ever. They're responsible for The Red Shoes, after all. All that beauty serves a story like this so well, where characters are carried away by something unexplained, by a sense of something outside of themselves that makes them lose their senses. It's beautiful and it's hot, and they're in love but they don't understand it and they can't control it, they want to be free but it's too much...this is a really special and underrated film. It has an energy to it, a buzz, like the electricity in the air on a windy night. It's not to be missed. 

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