Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s striking b/w hallucination is some sort of a mature sequel to Ken Russell’s perhaps overly praised The Devils. What Mother Joan of the Angels retains is the disturbing sense of the unseen that makes Huxley’s sociohistorical dissection of the infamous events of Loudun so fascinating.
Kawalerowicz’s empty volumes seem to tell of human desolation, the inherent loneliness of existence, and the fear of void as a representation of what led to believe in divine and demonic entities in the first place—the unknown.
The architectural sense of space in Mother Joan, the dialogue between the austerity of the structures and the lunar nowhere all around the convent, don’t just create a vivid contrast—they feed an unexpected dialogue of ancestral reminiscence. A similar sense of antipodean duality surfaces in different forms throughout the film. ‘You only want me to calm down to become greyer, smaller. To be exactly like all the other nuns. […] And you want to make me just like thousands of those aimless wanderers. […] If I can’t be a saint, I’d rather be damned,’ says Mother Joan to Father Suryn, incidentally echoing an idiosyncratic longing of a time, our, when more than ever everybody is striving to be someone only succeeding at being like anyone else. In another scene, Suryn is received by the local rabbi, who’s interpreted by the same actor. The two men verbally clash although the priest’s counterpart insists, ‘I am you, and you are me.’ And in a most memorable one, Suryn ambiguously meets Mother Joan in a room where the nuns’ freshly cleaned tunics are hung to dry. His dark cassock, her white habit, and their eyes looking for each other between the luminous robes—a marvellous moment of quiet transcendence and palpable eroticism.