This is a beautiful and challenging film. It is ambitious, sincere, but also intellectually playful. It is based on Pierre Klossowski's novel of the same name, a book easily classified as "unfilmable" - although nobody would ever contemplate filming it in the first place, except the fact that Ruiz did so. I must admit that I had difficulties understanding both the movie and the book, but the kind of difficulty was the same in both instances, so the adaptation seems adequate. And why expect to understand an ambitious movie from first viewing? Anyway: The central theme of the book, and even more of the movie, seems to be doubt. A young seminarist, a future priest, gets caught in a theological dogma war that ultimately leads to him bailing out. The conflict divides the church into various "zones", each of them trying to subvert the others - a little like the division of Nazi-occupied France at the time Klossowski himself was a seminarist. So is the church war a metaphor for the Second World War? Or is it a metaphor for the divided soul of the young seminarist? To add to the complication, the book appears not as straightforward narrative, but as summary and comment on an anonymous text circulating in the church. Ruiz replicates this formal twist in the structure of the film: A text scroll informs us that the film was initially shot in the 1940s, only to be completed, in a rather reverse manner, much later. Or was it? The off-commentary accompanying the text scroll tells a different story how the two versions of the movie came about. In any case, we have black-and-white scenes resembling a 1940s French movie, and color scenes with different actors set closer to the present. Confusing? Sure, but the confusion unfolds systematically, giving form and meaning to the doubt and tension of values in the story. I found it intriguing and won't take offence if you don't. One thing, though, is indisputable: This is a gorgeously shot film.
Review of The Suspended Vocation
