Black Narcissus (1947)

Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. Starring Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, May Hallatt, Jean Simmons, Esmond Knight, Shaun Noble.

Vibrant, fearless melodrama of the rising tensions among a group of Anglican nuns setting up a mission inside a crumbling palace that overlooks a towering cliff in the Himalayas. Charged with psychological distress, mad obsession, and highly-suggestive eroticism, it threatens to plummet into ruin at any minute, but directors Powell and Pressburger have crafted something so unsettling, peculiar, and yet engrossing that there’s no choice but to either surrender fully or turn away cold. Its challenge to faith upset many when the film was first released, but in the years since, it has emerged as a landmark in visual and emotional filmmaking, practically heaving off the screen in colors so bold as to be described as vulgar. One of the most sumptuously gorgeous films of its era, with Jack Cardiff’s painterly photography and Alfred Junge’s earthy production design each winning well-deserved Academy Awards. The directors also scripted from the novel by Rumer Godden. Turned into a TV mini-series in 2020.

89/100