Le moine

Dominik Moll (2011)

The eponymous monk, Friar Ambrosio, succumbs to fleshly desire.  If he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a story.  Ambrosio is left as a baby outside a Capuchin monastery near Madrid, on a spectacularly stormy night in 1596:  it’s the Feast of St Ambrose, hence the name given to the baby by the monks who take him in and raise him.  He has a huge and extraordinary birthmark, in the shape of a hand, on his right shoulder.  Some of the monks are fearful it’s the mark of the devil but Ambrosio grows up to be not only a devout member of the order but the most charismatic preacher of his time and place.  He’s intolerant of moral weakness: his motto is that Satan has only the power that human beings are ready to give him.  This harsh Savonarola clearly has to be taught a lesson.  Dominik Moll, none of whose previous features I’ve seen, does justice to the Gothic source material in the sense that he presents it with a straight face, even a po face.  Moll adapted the screenplay from the 1796 novel by Matthew Lewis (written before the author had turned twenty and so successful that he became known as Monk Lewis).  There are minatory gargoyles and more than one instance of supernatural healing.  There are dreams and visions and ominous crescendos (the score is by Alberto Iglesias).  Yet The Monk is lifeless.  Moll’s determination not to play the piece for laughs or scary entertainment is ambitious but the results are boring.

He’s encouraged his cast to follow suit.  In the lead, Vincent Cassel displays formidable concentration.  It’s remarkable how much more impressive Cassel is when he’s speaking French:  his flashy performances in English-speaking roles in Eastern Promises and Black Swan have been so hollow they’ve made him nearly ridiculous (A Dangerous Method doesn’t really count since David Cronenberg made just about the whole cast ridiculous).  Here, Cassel is physically commanding and controlled.  There’s considerable inner force to his portrait of Ambrosio – he’s really tried to get inside the monk’s head.  But taking as seriously as Cassel does a character whose life and frame of mind are centuries remote from him and us isn’t the same as making Ambrosio’s religious belief live.  To succeed in doing this, although a big challenge, is not an impossible one, as The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring proved; but Vincent Cassel isn’t Max von Sydow and Dominik Moll certainly isn’t Ingmar Bergman.  There’s no shame in that but Moll’s lack of feeling for the subject matter renders his respectful treatment of it pointless. Cassel is well supported by Josephine Japy as the paradisally beautiful virgin Antonia, with whom Ambrosio becomes obsessed, and Catherine Mouchet as her ailing, anxiously regretful mother (who also turns out to be Ambrosio’s mother so that he’s guilty not just of sins of the flesh in a general sense but of incest and, in due course, matricide too).  With Geraldine Chaplin as a stony abbess, Sergi López as a debauched incarnation of Satan, Déborah François as an Ambrosio groupie (she pretends to be a novice monk to get close to him but is a miracle worker for real), and Frédéric Noaille as Antonia’s milky admirer Lorenzo.

6 May 2012