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.
The troubled sisters of Black Narcissus
Credit: Miya Mizuno
Of all the great masterpieces of British film – and there really aren’t that many – surely the most wondrously strange is Black Narcissus. Released in 1947 in Technicolor, it’s the story of a pre-war community of Anglican nuns who try to establish a school and convent high in the Himalayas in a mysterious palace that once housed the harem of an Indian prince.
There the nuns encounter isolation, suspicion and an eruption of sexual desire, which descends into madness. The film’s director, Michael Powell, once said that “eroticism is in every frame and image from beginning to end”.