Behind Convent Walls
AKA: Interno di un convento
Sex Life in a Convent
Within a Cloister
(1977)
Reviewed by Tenebrous Kate
A Nunsploitation.Net review
Walerian Borowczyk's 1978 film, Behind Convent Walls, walks a tightrope between earthy farce and tragedy that might seem more at home on a Sixteenth Century stage than captured on film. Unlike other titles in the nunsploitation cannon, Borowczyk's take on the Women-In-God's-Prison theme is a bawdy romp that is free from the depictions of Satanism and torture that texture other similar flicks. This is still a scathing indictment of the Catholic Church, but Borowczyk's approach is to strip out the dark fantasy elements and force the viewer to confront the potential tragedy that results from the suppression of natural human sexual impulses. This vision is in contrast to the densely symbolic and dreamlike world of a director like Jean Rollin, or the compulsive camera-eye of a Jess Franco.
Borowczyk literality infuses every aspect of the film. The cinematography by Luciano Tovoli (veteran of Dario Argento's Suspiria and Tenebre) combines a hand-held camera with sensual soft focus that creates haloes of light around the faces of the nuns. A restrained color palette provides a sense of visual unity — as the title suggests, the film takes place entirely in one nunnery, and the colors are almost entirely limited to white, black, red and a woody neutral. It's a stunning film to look at that emphasizes the beauty of its main players — the experience of watching this film is like seeing a fabulously naughty image painted by Vermeer and then brought to life.
But back to those "natural human sexual impulses" that are the focus of this tale. This movie brims with sex and all natures of couplings are explored, sometimes in graphic detail. Softcore hetero and lesbian scenes abound, from furtive girl-on-girl breast-groping in a confessional (bonus points for the fourth-wall-busting "oh no we're too shy" response of the ladies to the voyeuristic camera's gaze) to a passionate outdoor deflowering to a rough-and-tumble quickie over a crate of chickens. A surprisingly explicit close-up scene of a nun masturbating with a homemade wooden dildo rounds out the "something for everyone" on-screen sex report. There's an effort to make the sex in this film look real and erotic without verging onto the territory of plastickey pornography or a fetish fulfillment checklist. Elements like the hand-painted erotica that one nun uses to trade for forbidden food or the very sexual crush that another nun has developed on Jesus himself add a innocence and even sweetness to the proceedings.
Behind Convent Walls is a more lighthearted erotic offering than many of the other "Nun of Monza" themed films, and is in keeping with Borowycz's brand of erotica. Sex is a driving force, and while the Church and its representatives are misguided in their efforts to halt the inevitable onrush of carnality, they stop far short of being evil.
This isn't so much a work of the fantastique as it is one of magical realism. The story takes place in the real world, but there are inexplicable quirks throughout that one must accept rather than struggle to explain. It serves to reflect conditions and issues that exist in reality rather than to represent them directly.
Tenebrous Kate is a Nunsploitation.Net reviewer. Visit her blog, the Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire or e-mail her at tenebrouskate@nunsploitation.net.
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