‘Mother Giovanna degli Angeli’

Mother Joan of the Angels – the plot

In an unspecified period of the seventeenth century, the mild father Josef Suryn is sent to a convent located in a desolate area of ​​the Polish countryside, following the report of some local prelates, according to whom eight demons are hidden in that sacred temple different, who have made succubus of their temptations and their evil all the nuns welcomed in the convent itself.

Among them, in particular, the Mother Superior, or mother Giovanna, does not hide her alleged possession, and turns to the priest with a request for help that hides something evil, an attempt to corrupt even the upright and thoughtful prelate.

– “I will go with you wherever you go. We are good people here.

-You all?

-Maybe not all of them. But we mustn’t judge the day before sunset. “

On the other hand, the priest who preceded him ended up burned at the stake with the accusation of witchcraft, and the very little corruptible man of the church just arrived, will also come to choose to sacrifice himself in order to be able to free souls. of those innocent sisters corrupted by evil.

Mother Joan of the Angels – the review

“-I don’t want your salvation: if I can’t be holy, I prefer to be damned! “

In his austere style that closely resembles the light and dark cinema, screeching and austere feelings of Dreyer, the talented Polish director Kawalerowicz is probably not content with carrying out an anti-religious invective that starts from a gloomy past to affect the strict everyday life of the time. release of the film. What, in all evidence, matters most to the famous filmmaker, is to probe the mysteries of human spirituality, which induces man to fossilize on unfathomable thoughts towards which to fall back and find that satisfaction that is summarized in a need for power, both material and heretically spiritual in nature.

For better or worse, at that point, alternatives appear equally valid to acquire a status of leader. Which, for better or for worse, allows the individual to make evident his uncontrolled and spasmodic desire to prevail over the mass.

Therefore even this intense and at times disturbing Mother Joan of the Angelstaken from a Polish tale of the same name by Jaroslaw Iwasziewiczin turn inspired by the cases of Loudun’s devils and by the story of Urbain Grandier, like much European cinema, from Bresson’s to Bergman’s cinema, draws strength on the unknowns that spirituality, always poised between sanctity and heresy, it carries with it.

The purpose of all this lies in the attempt to probe the more earthly and concrete aspect that guides the choices of a humanity that is overwhelmed by the most trivial and violent feelings.

Moods that push her to commit the most grim and unjustified acts of which too many chapters of the human adventure on the planet testify to the barbaric effects and the terrible consequences.

The story of the film insinuates itself in the viewer managing to make palpable the uneasiness that is emanating powerfully within the bare and unadorned walls of that distant abbey, representing the temptation of evil as a bewitching facet that lurks in latent human madness, fueled by desire of revenge and satisfaction that surrounds more than any other presupposition or possibility of earthly reward and satisfaction.