[Peter T Chattaway]

Right now I'm working on an essay on the treatment of sexual and romantic attraction in films based on Jesus and the gospels. The main focus of the article is Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), but along the way I plan to refer also to Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), for the 'I Don't Know How to Love Him' song and other things, and to Robert Young's Jesus (1999), in which Jesus and Mary the sister of Lazarus (for once, NOT Mary Magdalene!) are attracted to each other but Jesus tells her he cannot act on this attraction because he has a higher calling; I'll probably also touch on Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), which REALLY amplifies Mary Magdalene's sexuality, opening as it does with a scantily-clad Mary hosting a party and asking where her lover Judas is; when she hears that Judas is devoted to a man named Jesus now, she rides off in a chariot pulled by plumed zebras to go get her man back; however, this rather unusual love triangle is quickly aborted when Jesus sees Mary and casts the Seven Deadly Sins out of her, and she pulls her robe around her to cover her body and become pure. (If anyone knows of any other films I should reference, please let me know!)

Anyway, I finished reading Nikos Kazantzakis's original novel The Last Temptation about a week ago, and it dawned on me that his novel pays quite a bit of attention not only to Jesus' renunciation of sexuality, but to Mary's as well -- except that in her case, she doesn't so much renounce it as have it stolen from her. Jesus is constantly referred to as "the son of Mary" throughout that book's pages, and Kazantzakis spends a fair section of the book's opening pages exploring how his version of Mary laments the fact that she has never felt her husband's warmth, etc. -- so the book affirms the FACT of the virginal conception, but denies the MEANING of it, at least in the minds of the book's characters (and for devout Christians, of course, if Jesus and Mary don't appreciate the virginal conception, then why should anyone else?). But this element is missing altogether from Scorsese's film -- we see Mary only a few short times, and when the "dream sequence" comes and Jesus confronts Paul, Jesus calls himself "the son of Joseph and Mary" and we are left with the impression that Paul has invented the virgin birth just to buttress the other myths he's been making up (never mind that the subject never comes up even once in the real Paul's own epistles -- Paul may very well have shared this belief, but it wasn't exactly central to his teachings).

So, pondering this difference between the book and film, it dawned on me that there has been at least one other film that caused a stir because of how it addressed the sexuality, or at least the physicality, of Mary, rather than that of Jesus. And that film is Je vous salue, Marie, a 1985 film by French New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard. I was in my mid-teens when this film came out, but I vaguely remember reading stories in the papers about how this film modernized the Nativity story by setting it in present-day France and putting Mary on a basketball team and making her father the owner of a gas station and making Joseph a taxi driver ... and how it caused a lot of controversy because we see a lot of Mary nude.

I have seen the film at least once before, when I was first getting into the whole Jesus-movie genre back in the mid-'90s, but that was so long ago I figured I should rent it again; and so, a couple days ago, I did.

The video begins with a short film called The Book of Mary by, um, Anne something-or-other -- not Godard, anyway. It lasts about half an hour and concerns a young girl whose parents are separating; I jotted down a few bits here and there (Dad: "Women don't invent much. Even the soul was invented by a man"; in a different scene, Mom: "But nothing can stay the same, it becomes different. When something stops moving, it's dead"), and I especially like the scene where young Mary dances her heart out, but there's no overt connection to Godard's film. The short film ends with Mary breaking an egg -- to thwart the unification of Europe, if I understood her dialogue correctly -- and then suddenly, as soon as the egg is broken, we cut to a title card that says "At That Time" and before we know it, we're in Godard's film (in which the title card that says "At That Time" comes up again and again and again).

Godard's film, per se, is short for a feature -- about 75 minutes -- and overall, I think it's one of the more interesting dull movies, or one of the most boring interesting films, ever made. By this I mean that Godard, as with some of his other films, tends to be too arty for his own good, however I find his treatment of Mary fascinating because he actually affirms her ever-virginity even as he makes us extremely aware of the fact that she was a human being with breasts and a vagina and complex emotional ties to the other people in her life. That may sound more exploitative than it is; suffice to say that this film's Mary, having vowed never to touch a man, not even to kiss him, and having accepted that she will bear the Son of God, goes on to obsess over the changes and discomfort to her body the way the protagonist in a Judy Blume novel might. "Thy will be done," she says in one scene, but as she writhes in pain on her bed -- a pain that she figures may be greater than that felt by other pregnant women -- she also harbours thoughts that are a bit more negative. Let's just say she has mixed emotions (in one of her many voice-overs, Mary says, "It will always be horrible for me to be the Master, but there'll be no more sexuality in me. I'll know the true smile of the soul, not from outside, but from inside. Like a pain that's always deserved").

The men don't come off very well in this film. Joseph is not the noble soul concerned for Mary's reputation in Matthew's gospel, but a very jealous lover ("For two years I can't touch you. Why? . . . You must be sleeping around. It's the only answer. Guys with big cocks!") who seems to be keeping a mistress on the side at first, though it is not clear to me whether this mistress was simply pursuing Joseph or whether they had actually had an affair. (Said mistress is played by Juliette Binoche, a decade before her Oscar-winning role in The English Patient.) Part of the arc of the film is the way Joseph eventually gives up trying to pressure Mary into sleeping with him, and accepts that he is to be her companion even though he will never "know" her that way. In one scene, a half-naked Mary stands before Joseph as he reaches toward her stomach and says "Je t'aime", and Mary says "Non!" and slaps his hand away every single time until he says "Je t'aime" with the right kind of love. At one point in this encounter, Gabriel barges in from out of nowhere and yanks Joseph's hand away. "But why?" asks Joseph. "Because!" says Gabriel. "Because it's Law!" Gabriel then proceeds to slap Joseph around a little. (Gabriel had done this already at least once before, when he spotted Joseph with Juliette and asked him what he was doing with "that tramp".) At the end of this scene, a rather resigned Joseph commits himself to Mary for good and declares that he will never touch her again. But you can still feel his jealousy later on, when their child is a few years old and permitted to stick his head under Mary's nightie and point to the various euphemistically-named body parts. "He's too old to see you naked now," grumbles Joseph, to which Mary replies, "Quia respexit, Joseph", which is presumably a reference to that bit in the Magnificat where the biblical Mary says, "For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden".

I guess that raises the issue of voyeurism, both ours and God's, and with regard to this film and each other. In one of her earlier voice-overs, Mary says, "Yet I rejoiced in giving my body to the eyes of Him who has become my Master forever, and glanced at this wondrous being. For in truth, He was that, then and always, not for His looks nor what He did, but in the silent power of what He was, the power gathered up in Him, vast as a mountain on the sky, that you can't measure or name, but only feel." And in another voice-over near the end of the film, she says, "There are no looks in love, no outward seeming, no likeness. Only our hearts will tremble in the light. I can't describe Him as He stood there, but I can tell you how the women looked on seeing Him." For what that's worth.

Another recurring theme is, of course, the relationship between body and spirit. I don't know Godard very well, but in some reviews of this film I have read, it is said that this film marks a break of sorts with the more materialistic leanings of his earlier films. Certainly his version of Mary believes that the spirit is higher than the body, mainly because it animates the body. When she visits her gynecologist, she asks, "Does the soul have a body?" and the doctor replies, "What do you mean, young lady, the body has a soul." "I thought it was the opposite," she replies. There is another scene where Mary remarks that flesh alone is not enough -- the world is full of flesh, the way that stores are full of candles, but it isn't until you take the candle home with you that it can give you any comfort. Later on she looks at a book on Saint Francis and observes that his nickname for his body was "Brother Donkey" (and near the end of the film, as Mary carries her baby out of a car, there is a prolonged close-up on the face of a nearby donkey -- a symbol of the biblical Mary's journey to Bethlehem? a symbol of the body that God has taken on?). In one of the early scenes in which Joseph is still struggling with Mary's abstinence, Mary asks him, "Why don't you believe the spirit affects the body?" and he replies, "I believe the opposite." In a voice-over not too long after that, as Mary strips and puts on her nightie, she says, "Let the soul be body. Then no one can say the body is soul, since the soul shall be body." The "quia respexit" scene fits in here too, methinks -- Mary's physical body is implicitly identified as the focal point of her "low estate", rather than, say, being a member of the peasant class or any of the other reasons the biblical Mary may have considered herself "low"; the film's Mary regards the body as inherently inferior to the spirit; and yet, the fact that spirit animates the body means the body is good.

One subplot that I haven't mentioned yet involves a married professor who has an affair with a student named Eva -- who, yes, is seen in one prolonged close-up biting into an apple. The first time we see Eva, she is playing with a Rubik's Cube while the professor explains to the class that life could not have evolved on Earth by chance -- it must have come from outer space! "We wonder what an extra-terrestrial looks like. Go to a mirror and look at yourself," he says. Taken literally, this is of course pretty loopy, but as the professor makes clear in a later scene, the deeper truth is, of course, that there is something about us that is not of this world, something about us that is "born of heaven."

The film does end, however, on a somewhat ambiguous note, as Gabriel sees Mary sitting in her car and hails her, and as she smokes a cigarette and tentatively puts on some lipstick. Are such things a distraction from the matters of the spirit? Or have such things been made sacred by the spirit? The film doesn't quite say, but it does leave you thinking -- assuming, that is, that you haven't nodded off long before then.

FWIW, I love Roger Ebert's one-and-a-half star review of this film, which is written as an open letter to his local Catholic cardinal, who was preparing a protest against the film at the time.

(Side note: Gabriel and his niece arrive on an airplane, an idea that Hal Hartley borrowed for his Second-Coming flick Book of Life (1998). And the way the two angels seem to struggle just to tie a shoelace is a cute way to introduce the idea that there is something unearthly about them.)

[mike_h]

Quote

(If anyone knows of any other films I should reference, please let me know!)

I'm watching Jesus Movies now, too, like more than a few of us, I suspect. A couple films I've seen recenty come to mind as pertinent for the focus you're talking about.

In Jesus of Montreal, the character of Mierelle is identified with the Virgin Mary (primarily by her ex-boyfriend the director), which is poignant as you consider her career of baring her body for sleazy tv commercials. There's also the amazing "temple clearing" sequence, when Daniel/Jesus flips over the cameras and tv monitor after the ex-boyfriend insists Mierelle bear her breasts for the clients at an audition -- a scene which generates more genuine outrage over the defilement of that which is sacred than any temple clearing scene I've ever seen. In some ways, Mierelle echos Mary Magdalene, along with the other woman in the film, Constance (who, as you have noted, shows up again later in Barbarian Invasions.) There's a scene where Mierelle is sponging off Daniel in the tub, and Constance comes by asking if "you two are still making goo-goo eyes at each other" or something like that. The meaning is left pretty ambiguous, but this is a fairly liberal retelling of the Gospel, so who knows what's going on there.

The other film I was going to point you toward is one I haven't yet finished, the Jesus mini series from 1999, directed by Roger Young. This one's all over the map in terms of quality and originality. But one of several interesting things going on is the early scenes when Joseph and his grown son are doing some carpentry work for their friend Lazarus. Martha and Lazarus both keep trying to fix up Jesus with their sister, Mary, who is obviously in love with Jesus. Later, Jesus talks to Joseph about the situation, and Joseph asks, "Do you love her?" and Jesus replies, "Yes," but, in an "I don't know how to love her" way. Ultimately, he has to let her down gently and go off to fulfill his mission. But it's an interesting and believable dynamic (if you can get over how boy-band-hunky Jesus is in this one). Not that the film as a whole lives up to its best moments, but definately some sparks flying there that make it worth looking into for your project.

If I think of any other films or scenes that have relevance for what you're doing, I"ll let you know.

[Peter T Chattaway]

mike_h wrote:
: In Jesus of Montreal . . .

Yeah, I've had a few scenes from this film pass through my mind as I work on this subject, but I am generally inclined to set it aside, since it is not a re-enactment of the biblical story (even a modernized re-enactment), but rather, a thoroughly modern allegory.

: There's also the amazing "temple clearing" sequence, when Daniel/Jesus
: flips over the cameras and tv monitor after the ex-boyfriend insists
: Mierelle bear her breasts for the clients at an audition -- a scene which
: generates more genuine outrage over the defilement of that which is
: sacred than any temple clearing scene I've ever seen.

FWIW, the scene is also cited by feminist scholars like Margaret Miles as an example of how male directors try to have their cake and eat it too -- we are supposed to feel outrage that Mierelle has been obliged to show her breasts, and yet, Denys Arcand actually shows us the breasts of the actress who plays Mierelle! (Cf. Ebert's reaction to a similar scene in Girl 6.)

: The other film I was going to point you toward is one I haven't yet
: finished, the Jesus mini series from 1999, directed by Roger Young.

Yes, you'll notice I actually mention this one in the second sentence of my original post.

[MattPage]

If its any help I can't really think of much either. I mean if you wanted to chart the arc more fully then there's a still from "From the manger to the cross" (1912) which comes to mind with Mary sitting at Jesus's feet which always seems to have a hint of something other than admiration in, but I can't remember whether there's anything in the rest of the film that backs that up.

Oh oh, and in Russell Davies's Son of God a story about Jesus returning to Modern Day Manchester The Jesus character (Steve) is involved with a woman there who is clearly meant to be seen as a Mary Magdalene character (tho she's called Judith) and :spoilers: [quote]it's her that talks him into killing himself at the end of the movie so that humanity can supposedly move on but as far as I'm aware that's only been released over here.

But nothing else springs to mind.

Matt

[mike_h]

QUOTE

as an example of how male directors try to have their cake and eat it too

Yeah, "having your cake and eating it, too" often seems to be the whole point of many movies. I was thinking that as I was watching some of these Biblical Epics, how you can simultaneously enjoy these bloodthirsty ancient empires, and also judge and feel morally superior to them. A little bit of the same effect with Nazi movies, where the director takes a little too much pleasure in those flapping red flags and stirring rows of jackboots and black helmets.

QUOTE

Yes, you'll notice I actually mention this one in the second sentence of my original post.  :)

Try not to let that happen again.

[MattPage]

DeMille is particularly famous for exploiting the audience's desire for titilation whilst avoiding criticism by ultimately preaching morality at them . 'It's OK to show an orgy so long as they get a comeuppence in the end' type mentality. He seemed to realise that audiences wanted to see it they just also had this respectable facard (sp?) so they could appear upright.

I'm not sure much is different with JofM. The feminists are right as far as they go, but it seems to me the general movie going public has at least as much to answer for as the directors

Matt

[MattPage]

Just noticed that Hail AMry is due for a US & Canada DVD release in March

Matt

[MattPage]

Well I finally saw this yesterday, in prep for that TV interview I've yet to tell everyone about properly.

It was my first Goddard film, so not much to go on in terms of his usual output. Peter your "boring & interesting" film comments sum it up very well.

Only a few comments as I'm really pressed for time, but...

I was interested by how conservative this films theology was for a controversial film. It always interested me that Jesus of Montreal which is much more liberal with it;s theology seemed to avoid huge protests whereas two films which explore, but ultimately re-affirm orhtodox belief in the death and resurection of Jesus (Last Temptation) and the incarnation (Hail Mary) and Jesus's divinity (both) copped it so much. I guess it was all the nudity. What does that say?

Anyway, I was fascinated by the use of music in the film dwhich was quite abrupt. Very noisy and Bombastic at times, and cutting in and out very oddly. I liked it but wished I was watching with my brother (who is the classical musician in the family) so he could temm le what piece was what. There was one bit also in Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, which I think was probably Bach's St Matthew Passion (?), and a few other bits that sounded like they could have a religious significance (and I guessed that they did), but the only piece of religous classical music I can recognise off the bat is Handel's Messiah, which , thankfully, isn't in the film.

I was also trying to puzzle out the Eva scenes, which IIRC entirely separate from the Mary scenes. I noticed how the man kept calling her Eve instead of Eva, as if he was aware of the temptation he was yielding to because of this woman.

I also liked the scene where the boy Jesus starts changing his friends names to Peter and James. Nice touch of humour.

My favourite comment that I've read on the film was by Kinnard and Davis who note that they could have avoided the controversy if only they had not used the names Mary and Joseph. I suspect the explicit nude scenes might have proved them wrong.

Anyway, there was much I really didn't get. I thought the film was longer than 75 mintues as my vieo box said it was 107 minutes, but then there was about 20 minutes of blanktape at the end of the film, and even Maltin's noted the confusion there.

Matt

[Peter T Chattaway]

MattPage wrote:
: I thought the film was longer than 75 mintues as my vieo box said it was 107 minutes,
: but then there was about 20 minutes of blanktape at the end of the film, and even
: Maltin's noted the confusion there.

Although Maltin does say that the running time IS 107 minutes -- he doesn't say there are different cuts of the film, only that different running times have been "credited" to the film.

Maybe the confusion is partly due to The Book of Mary, the short film directed by one of Godard's associates, which plays before Hail Mary on the video? (Or did your version not come with that?)

[MattPage]

Yeah I got an NTSC version from America so I got that film too, which I've yet to see. FWIW the IMDB lists the runtime as "Australia 105 min"

Matt

[Peter T Chattaway]

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