A small French town in the Alps, World War II. Barny is a widow whose Jewish husband was killed, her little daughter France secretly lives in the house of another family, while she works correcting assignments for a correspondence school that has moved from Paris. She falls in love with a co-worker, Sabine. As a communist and atheist, Barny randomly goes to a Catholic church for confession to mock religion, but the young priest Leon Morin actully listens and tries to talk to her. Intruiged, Barny actually goes to visit Leon at his office and they talk about religion and philosophy twice a week. Barny converts to Christianity again. She falls out of love with Sabine, who aged after hearing her brother was killed by the Nazis, and falls in love with Leon. The American soldiers enter the town. Barny confesses her love to Leon, but he rebuffs her and says goodybe since he is being transferred to another city.
A year after Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Pierre Melville appeared as actor-actor in Godard's "A bout de souffle", they appeared as actor-director in the drama "Leon Morin, Priest", which film critic Roger Ebert included in his list of Great Movies. "Leon Morin" is a peculiar film that cannot be quite defined: Melville uses a classicist style (simplicity, minimalism, clarity of structure, restrained emotion, appeal to the intellect) to conjure up the storyline, but it is composed out of two incompatible halves—the one revolving around the relationship between an atheist woman and a Catholic priest, the other around the Nazi occupation of France during World War II—which are not that harmonious. It would have been a better film if it only focused on the first story, since the war subplot is questionable and feels shoehorned, like an "intruder" at times. The hidden theme is the search for love: heroine Barny (excellent and underrated actress Emmanuelle Riva) seeks love from her co-worker Sabine, from her dead husband, from the Catholic priest, from God—but she never receives it, it is always unrequited love, she stays alone, and thus the movie feels depressive and resigned in its overall tone while depicting this harsh world. The episodes are uneven—some are weaker, yet the best ones have some outstanding, brilliant dialogues, mostly between Barny and Leon.
In one chat at his office, they have this honest exchange: "You need a husband." - "Too bad. I do it with a stick". - "You'll hurt yourself." - "I'm not fragile." After a mass in the church, Barny says this to her friend: "There are two things I'm absolutely certain about, yet they're contradictory! Father Morin is spiritually the most inspiring fellow I've ever known. And yet, last Sunday, there's no doubt about it, he deliberately walked by me, brushing me with his surplice. Imagine how I felt." At her home, Barny finally asks Leon if he would marry her if he were a Protestant priest. He hesitates in silence, then stands up, takes an axe and slams it on the wood chopper, before leaving. Barny just thinks for herself: "His hand, in a single gesture, had given all and taken all away." 96 minutes into the film, there is a dream scene that is highly unusual and deviates from the rest of the film due to an unusual camera drive which works in opposition to the static shots presented mostly up to it (Barny is in bed, the camera rotates around her to show a silhouette on the door; the door opens, but it is empty; the camera pans down, under the chair; Leon enters and kisses her as the camera rotates again around them). However, Leon is never as intimate and as honest with Barny during their dialogues, since he is always at the service of spreading religious apologetics, and thus this never reaches the coziness and comfiness of Rohmer's similar "My Night at Maud's". One episode is particularly badly done: Barny hears that her friend Christine will be killed by the partisans for her collaboration with the occupiers, but when she tells this to Leon, he advises her to stay out of it. Christine is later on indeed killed. This inexplicable passive indifference from Leon leaves a bitter aftertaste that makes him a far less sympathetic character than before, and it wrecks the movie structure. The ending is weak, and it's not quite clear if the movie intends to be critical of religion or not. "Leon Morin, Priest" is a film that will leave you thinking for so long that you'll be angry at it for not being a masterwork, since its flaws hold it back, but at the same time, so little prevents it to reach that coveted status.
Grade:+++
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