Last Wednesday, I went to catch the new 4K restoration of Ken Russell’s 1971 fever dream masterpiece The Devils at SIFF Downtown.
If you’re not familiar, the film—which is adapted from Aldous Huxley’s 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s 1961 play The Devils—follows the original Hot Priest, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), who becomes the target of witchcraft rumors for simply being too slutty. The sex-starved mother superior Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave at the top of her game) becomes fixated on Grandier, which manifests in an outbreak of hysteric “demonic possessions” among the convent’s nuns. Unsurprisingly, corrupt church and state officials try to manipulate the mayhem to their benefit by plotting Grandier’s downfall.
Russell created The Devils while questioning his own devotion to the Catholic faith, describing it as “the final nail in the coffin” of his belief. The film was met with intense controversy for its explicit depictions of sex and violence and its blasphemous themes, which earned it an X rating during its original release. The reputation stuck; in 2015, Time Out cited it as one of the “50 most controversial films of all time. ”Now, The Devils has gained a new audience with its 4K restoration (its rating downgraded to a mere NC-17) and has been so successful at the box office that its theatrical run has been extended multiple times.
As I snacked on SIFF Downtown’s chocolate popcorn while watching a parade of increasingly depraved acts, I was completely hypnotized by the film: the opulent glam rock-esque costumes designed by Russell’s wife Shirley, Reed and Redgrave’s staggering performances, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s haunting, discordant score, which echoes the descent into madness. I’ve never seen anything else like it. It made me feel like I had lost my mind, and I have been having flashbacks all week. I can’t wait to see it again.
One of the things that stuck out to me was how overtly GAY it was for a movie made in 1971! The film’s queer look is no accident: Genius gay icon, multi-hyphenate, and new queer cinema pioneer Derek Jarman designed the mod white sets, which were influenced by the cityscape in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, neoclassical art, and the minimalist white backdrops in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. (It was Jarman’s first time working in the film industry, and it took him three months to design the set, but Russell was reportedly very supportive and patient, despite his lack of speed and experience.)
The most obviously gay part of the movie is the sapphic nuns, whose repression drives them into frenzied fornication. At one point, news reaches the convent that Grandier has married a woman, spurring two of the nuns to dress up in drag as the bride and groom and conduct a mock wedding ceremony, going so far as to “consummate” the marriage on a mattress—and yes, it’s as gay as it sounds. In the film’s most famous scene, the entire cloister breaks out into a huge bacchanalian orgy, masturbating with crucifixes and grinding on a statue of Christ.
We can’t talk about this film’s queerness without discussing the flamboyant King Louis XIII, played by Graham Armitage. The film opens with a gender-ambiguous figure posed in a tableau vivant recreation of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, wearing nothing but gold boots and a few strategically placed gilded seashells. This is revealed to be the king, who is subsequently crowned and wrapped in flashy celestial robes—a scene that conveys the egotism of the king, the pageantry of the court, and the mockery the monarch has made of Catholicism. Later in the film, he amuses himself by shooting Protestants dressed in bird suits.
Louis XIII is far from the only character of this kind: Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard), a Catholic priest specializing in witch-hunting and exorcisms, is styled after the androgynous glam rock kings of the ’70s and the bowl-cutted Canon Jean Mignon, played by openly gay actor Murray Melvin, looks exactly like a modern-day twink. Also spotted: a few extras in drag and so many queer haircuts that would not look out of place on Capitol Hill today.
The Devils character I couldn’t stop thinking about was Philippe Trincant, the petulant, ringlet-curled daughter of the King’s powerful prosecutor Louis Trincant. Played by British actress Georgina Hale, she steals scene after scene with her powdered white face and green lipstick. When we first meet her, she’s lying nude and sweaty in Grandier’s bed after sex and tells him she’s pregnant, after which he unceremoniously dumps her. Later, she begs him to take her back and is spurned. Justice for Philippe!
While The Devils is a delightfully salacious, erotic piece of filmmaking, it does warrant questioning why some of its evil figures are depicted as so effeminate. On one hand, I’m disturbed by the implications of portraying queer-coded characters like King Louis XIII as villainous and vain, especially in a time that demonizes queerness so stringently. On the other, I can’t help but think of one of my favorite quotes from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House:
“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them…I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognise the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Although some of these antagonists are painted, as Machado writes, as “foppish” and “cruel,” I couldn’t keep my eyes off them as they transgressed their way to the top. The Devils also makes it clear that it’s the people in power sowing and reaping the rewards of moral panic who are the real villains—an all-too-familiar message for our times—and the campy pageantry and theatrics make it a cinematic feast well worth its 144-minute runtime. There are still some showtimes available at Regal Meridian before it closes on Wednesday, so see it while you can!
