Review of Léon Morin, Priest (1961)
Seen in 2026.
I saw the restored 130-minute version.
A young widow works for a correspondence school, relocated from Paris to the countryside. France is occupied, so the town where she now lives is visited first by Italians, then by Germans, and finally by Americans. As the years go by, she falls in love with a girl, starts taking the threat against Jews seriously, and goes to a young priest in the local Catholic church. At first, she mocks the man, pretending to confess. She is an atheist, but he surprises her.
The script is primarily novelistic and the pace is slow. This makes for an experience radically different from Jean-Pierre Melville’s previous film, Breathless (1960), which had the same leading man. Still, there are moments of skillfully derealized image and sound, and the attention to detail is good. There are no scenes of action or warfare. Instead, the staircase to Morin’s office, gorgeously weathered as it is, makes for a cinematic refrain.
It’s fun to see Jean-Paul Belmondo as an earnest and progressive Catholic, but unfortunately, the auteur takes the side of Catholicism right up to the glorious downer ending. On the way there, there are many interesting little asides concerning Vichy-French society in the time of the Holocaust, close enough in time to the real thing to be realistic.