Stunning: the original Black Narcissus
Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film of Black Narcissus took decades to be fully appreciated for its storytelling, but as a deliriously lush visual achievement it was admired straightaway. Despite censorship battles in America about its quivering erotic subtext, and even the reluctance of the book’s author, Rumer Godden, to give her seal of approval, it won two Oscars – for Jack Cardiff’s groundbreaking Technicolor cinematography and Alfred Junge’s ingenious art direction.
The film transports us, in its heightened, fever-dream way, to the abandoned palace of Mopu, site of a former harem high in the Himalayas, where the Anglican mission led by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) will try to found their convent, and will stumble, thanks to the eerie character of the place and the very air.
Gemma Arterton and the Black Narcissus cast on their BBC Christmas drama: ‘It’s The Shining with nuns’
The i 12/17/2020 Gerard Gilbert
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Call the Midwife costume department doesn’t have a monopoly on wimples this Christmas. BBC One’s Black Narcissus tells of an order of Anglo-Catholic nuns tasked with setting up a school and hospital in an abandoned palace in the Tibetan Himalayas. The dilapidated fictional citadel of Mopu used to house a harem, and the building’s lubricious past seems to be rubbing off on the sisters of St Faith.
The three-part drama stars Gemma Arterton as St Faith’s inexperienced leader, Sister Clodagh, Aisling Franciosi from Game of Thrones and The Fall as the disturbed Sister Ruth, and a supporting cast which includes Jim Broadbent and, in her final screen appearance, the late Diana Rigg as the Mother Superior who sends the sisters to Tibet.