(Ed. Note: Originally published at Image Facts.)
“Exquisite Yearning!… Exotic Living! High in a hidden mountain village of a strange land and extravagant dreams and desires become exciting realities!”
(Tagline to the film. No, seriously, it really is.)
The successes of Powell’s Black Narcissus are well documented. Scorsese said it was being like “bathed in color,” the over-realized storyboarding of films like Taxi Driver channeling this influence. It epitomizes Powell’s almost Kandinskian passion for networking image and score, the climax played out as a wordless dance before the orchestra actually on set. It presages the eros literally foregrounded in his later, more pointedly (get it?) self awarePeeping Tom, which works in his filmography like a footnote referring to the aspects of Black Narcissus originally apparent only to the most Freudian of viewers. It out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock in its relentless pscho-what-have-you subtext as a story of unequipped English nuns in an ex-colony of the Empire. Here in this outpost of influence, the mere whiff of a handkerchief soaked in imported “Black Narcissus” perfume conjures up all the ironies inherent to the myth of colonialism. To the locals, it is a material vision of affluence. To the nuns, a cul-de-sac of spiritual ambivalence.
It is from this subtext that some of the best scenes of the film emerge. Of course the ending, eloquently choreographed and mathematically executed as if the performers are notes on a segment of sheet music, is a perfect microcosm for Powell’s career in the same way that the end of Breathless is for Godard or the beginning of Andrei Rublev is for Tarkovsky. But sequences like the brief shots of Jean Simmons, playing the bejewelled local lolita, secretly sniffing fumes of Black Narcissus at the top of the screen as they pass over Sister Clodagh’s head are even more successful in their phrasing of the film’s context. In 1947, the year of this film’s release, Indian gained independence from Britian, putting Powell’s nuns in sharper relief from their missional subjects. Here Jean Simmon’s seductive character looms over the receding Empire, already a present critiquing a past.
And continuing this direction, Powell sows the character arc of Sister Clodagh with several flashbacks to her past, in which she traded romance for the cloth. One of these flashbacks in particular is a montage sequence of a fox hunt in the Irish countryside. Horses thunder over hedges, barking dogs crash through the fields, flashes of plus-fours and knee-high boots, and an eventual long shot of the valley through which the party is rumbling. And then Powell jarringly edits back to the grey vista from the edge of the monastery, scattering acidic traces of the violence, passion, and vigor of the hunt. In this brief space between the montage and its context, this most British of pastimes reads well with the similarly erotic past of the monastery this nun is attempting to redeem (it used to be an apartment block for the emperor’s concubines). This sort of scene is what post-colonialists live for, doing in the span of seconds what it takes Jane Campion quite a while to do in The Piano, albeit with zero explicit sexual imagery.
In Powell’s hands these mere whisps of memory become charged with eroticisms and cultural critiques that post-war Western academia hadn’t caught onto yet, his films becoming Duchamp installations without the naked ladies or Dali paintings without the juvenile Freudian digs. Or maybe Rorschach tests that really dolook like naughty bits, two-dimensional masterpieces held before squinting philosophers and psychoanalysts just now coming to grips with the death of modernism. “Exquisite yearning” indeed.