This film is inspired very freely by a real fact of the French Resistance: the affair of Sister Marie Philomène. The documentation on this case is very low; All that is known is that Sister Marie Philomène (of her surname Lucie Million) was arrested by a group of resistance fighters in the Dordogne on 24 January 1944 and executed for treason on 8 February. All the rest of the story is pure fiction.
The fiction imagines therefore a failed love affair of the nun for a priest engaged in resistance.
The character of the nun is probably the best : her amorous enlightenment, her naivety, her stubbornness, her wound, her moral decomposition, her desire for revenge are transcribed brilliantly.
The other characters are unfortunately much more dull, notably the priest whose character is cruelly lacking in thickness.
The problem is there: the historical context and the secondary characters (that is, all characters except the nun) are under-exploited; They serve only as a pretext to relate the pangs of an amorous disappointment that could very well have been transposed to the identical in a bourgeois of the 21st century or a Parisian nineteenth-century worker. The originality of the theme, the religious background of the character, is ultimately very little exploited, unless the director wanted to demonstrate that the nuns are women like the others, crossed by the same feelings and the same weaknesses.
The fiction imagines therefore a failed love affair of the nun for a priest engaged in resistance.
The character of the nun is probably the best : her amorous enlightenment, her naivety, her stubbornness, her wound, her moral decomposition, her desire for revenge are transcribed brilliantly.
The other characters are unfortunately much more dull, notably the priest whose character is cruelly lacking in thickness.
The problem is there: the historical context and the secondary characters (that is, all characters except the nun) are under-exploited; They serve only as a pretext to relate the pangs of an amorous disappointment that could very well have been transposed to the identical in a bourgeois of the 21st century or a Parisian nineteenth-century worker. The originality of the theme, the religious background of the character, is ultimately very little exploited, unless the director wanted to demonstrate that the nuns are women like the others, crossed by the same feelings and the same weaknesses.