Blue Nuns

By J.C.

THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN

Directed by DAMIANO DAMIANI Screenplay by DAMIANO DAMIANl, FABRIZIO ONOFRI and AUDREY NOHRA

Hot times at the hostel: a young journalist (Claudio Cassinelli) is pressed by an eager priest to collaborate on memoirs that will try to explain away his wartime cooperation with the Nazis. The priest has lodgings at a religious hostel virtually at the Vatican's threshold and books a room for the journalist just down the corridor. As is usually the way with such fictive establishments, the place is a hotbed of perversion, frustration and bad manners. Presiding over these various follies is an iron maiden passing as a nun (Glenda Jackson), who gets her jollies by encouraging everyone else in theirs, then condemning them.

It becomes dismayingly obvious before The Devil Is a Woman gets too far along that Director Damiano Damiani intends yet another anticlerical tract, with healthy doses of lubricity included to get the unconverted over the rough parts. Assignations are revealed, suicides initiated and plots thickened. One resident spills out a tale of hot romance with his sister. His parents did not approve and shipped him off to the hostel for safekeeping. Jackson finds religious relief-- and, one supposes, some measure of sexual satisfaction -- by strapping a belt of thorns around her waist very tightly. The collaborationist priest craves extra desserts at mealtimes.

As a sinner, he does not amount to much, but he does have that Nazi busi ness to brood about.

While Catholicism takes it squarely on the chin a number of times, Damiani's point is that there is just no getting away from Mother Church. As it turns out, he means it quite literally. The journalist escapes from the Jackson regime, and other residents of the hostel defect as well. But none can live without the church's comforting repression. All find their way back there quite soon, except the journalist, the eternal skeptic, who just has a good laugh about the whole thing. The Devil Is a Woman, however, makes a pretty flat cosmic joke.

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