"It's Sister Ruth. She's Gone Mad"

I have decided that, for me, the Ultimate Movie operates along the same lines as the Ultimate Ballet. The Ultimate Ballet should, of course, have the following components: an exotic locale, unrequited love, madness or a curse or something, and a healthy dose of hardcore angst. The Ultimate Movie I have in mind has a bonus, however. Nuns. For me, there are few things as picturesque as a pre-Vatican II nun and since they exist outside my personal experience I find them exotic as well.

Made in 1947 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Black Narcissus is about a group of Anglican nuns who travel to a remote village in the Himalayas to start a new branch of their order. A local Prince gives the nuns a huge but dilapidated palace set high upon a cliff and though they are warned that the House of Ladies (it used to house a local Prince’s wives) is no place for a nunnery, they forge ahead with their plans to do good, educating the young girls and curing disease. Beset with problems from the get-go, the young Sister Superior (Deborah Kerr) tries to maintain control, but the new environment seems to encourage nostalgia and exaggerated emotional outbursts and she is forced to turn to Mr. Dean, the Prince's agent, for help.

As confusion increases and tensions rise, the nuns find themselves at sixes and sevens. Sister Superior becomes lost in the long ago, dreaming of Conrad, the young man who jilted her, throwing her into the arms of the church; Sister Phillipa plants flowers instead of much needed vegetables while staring into the distance; and the paranoid and sinister Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) becomes obsessed with Mr. Dean and leaves the nunnery, wearing lipstick! The plot thickens and violence ensues. I won't give it away, but the end is very much like a tragic ballet, full of over the top melodrama. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: with mad nuns, you couldn’t possibly go wrong.

Truly, it is an incredibly beautiful film and I think the story would make the most amazing ballet. It has all of the aforementioned necessary qualities plus a mad nun. It could be like Giselle, only they’re nuns in the Himalayas not Rhineland maidens and Ruth dies more violently than Giselle does, but they both have a mad scene and I think we need another ballet with a mad scene. It’s time.