Anne and Lore are two young girls who spend their high school years at a Catholic boarding school, leaving only on weekends to attend mass and boring family reunions. At night, they meet up under the comforter to exchange caresses and jokes at the expense of the nuns, who are harsh and stern but lustful on the sly, a fact that doesn't escape the attention of the two friends and cements their contempt for the adult world, Christian morality and bourgeois order.
To alleviate boredom and out of idiocy, they embark on increasingly cruel pranks; after warming the blood of a simpleton bachelor farmer, they burn down his farm to punish him for trying to force himself on Lore. This is followed by animal murders, thefts, the torture of a cat, and a black mass in allegiance to the Devil; until the murder, accidental but once again due to an uncontrolled attempt to seduce a mature man. Gradually cornered by the ensuing police investigation, refusing to be separated by prison or reform school, Anne and Lore commit suicide by setting themselves on fire after declaiming Baudelaire's Le Voyage during an end-of-year show, in front of their parents who applaud before realizing that it's not a trick.
I first came across Jeanne Goupil in a series of fantastico-political TV films about the Cathars, Disparitions, in which she played a sectarian nutcase. She had a strange but undeniable charm, with the body of a mature woman, plump in the most attractive sense of the word, contradicted by a face that still hinted at a young girl, or even a little girl.
The year was 2008. I was still willingly anti-clerical, willingly blasphemous – I didn't consider myself (although I was, without knowing it) an enemy of God, because I didn't exclude his existence and wasn't hostile to him, But the Church still seemed to me to be a bunch of old fathers of morality with no legitimacy and absurd, castrating recommendations, designed to exert control over Man and nothing to save him.
My position has evolved somewhat since then, and I probably wouldn't have watched Don't deliver us from Evil back then the way I do now.
The joyously subversive aspect of the film, typical of the 70s, its rejection of bourgeois morality, religion and Puritan hypocrisy, poorly conceals the profound sadness that emanates from Anne and Lore's journey – the inexplicable sadness that follows sin, where we thought we'd find pleasure, happiness and liberation; the vertigo of our own somnambulistic descent into the throes of stupidity and cruelty, to the point of perdition. The scene in which Anne bursts into tears after committing evil seems to be no more than an incident, a passing mood swing, whereas it is central; the game is no longer funny as it was at the beginning, the oath made to the Devil has been heard and taken seriously, and evil becomes a burden, a slavery from which one is unable to free oneself.
From this point of view, whatever its author's intentions, Don't deliver us from Evil is anything but a libertarian film – unlike, for example, an enjoyable nerd flick like Calmos, which dates from the same decade. Did the insauvable imbeciles at Libération, who describe the film as "a scathing, baroque charge against the bourgeois France of the seventies", simply notice that the two heroines die at the end of the film? That their trajectory has led them nowhere except to murder and suicide? And probably all the way to Hell, as the very last images suggest, where Anne and Lore are trapped in a fire of their own making, locked together, alone in the world, surrounded by flames, burning alive in front of their dismayed parents.
If Don't deliver us from Evil is a charge against the bourgeoisie, then it shows in reality, whether Séria is aware of it or not once again, not traditional morality itself, not the Good as conceived by Christianity, in itself, but the inability of parents, the clergy, the school, to transmit a taste for this Good. For it is the hypocrisy and mediocrity of both the Church and the world that make Good seem bland and Evil exciting.
The respect for propriety and the daily grind that stifle joie de vivre, curiosity, intelligence and expressions of affection. Material comfort. The satisfied bourgeoisie that builds a wall around itself against the disorder of Evil, but also against the disorder of Good. All this is just one side of the mountain that young people in search of the absolute and radicalism descend towards Hell.
The other side, paradoxical in appearance, is the imbecilic enthusiasm with which the same parents applaud the two girls during their macabre stage show. My parents also laughed heartily when they saw my inverted crosses, when they heard the records I played; adults no longer believe in Evil, and therefore no longer believe in Good either. They believe in propriety and career plans, in waste sorting and the adolescent crisis that means nothing and will eventually pass. All this without suspecting, or perhaps remembering, that teenagers, even in their laughable penchant for the macabre and deadly, are sometimes deadly serious.
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