BLACK NARCISSUS [8/10] – for ‘City Life’ magazine
One-of-a-kind classic from the directorial duo also responsible for the likes of The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.
A group of British nuns including prim-and-proper Deborah Kerr and mentally unstable Kathleen Byron move into a Himalayan palace that was once the residence of the pasha’s concubines. The altitude and fetid climate make things tough: relationships with the locals soon become strained; and the presence of strapping forester Mr Dean (David Farrar) tests the sisters vows of chastity to breaking point.
Shot entirely in and around Pinewood Studios, this astonishing-looking film transcends its melodramatic plot and moments of colonial creakiness to achieve a kind of demented, erotic, technicolour surrealism that hasn’t faded at all six decades later. God only knows what they made of it in 1946.
Neil Young
20th April, 2003
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