La faute de l'abbé Mouret

I admire Georges Franju a lot and his documentaries at the beginning of his career are exceptionally disturbing and thought provoking, and his ' Blood of Beasts ' set in a slaughter house is arguably his most controversial and greatest film. Due to the amount of cruelty shown in this film it is not often seen. Then he made more conventional narrative films, and his ' Eyes Without A Face ' is perhaps his best thanks partly to the casting of Alida Valli and Edith Scob. Once again cruelty prevails and audiences often felt ill watching it. ' La Faute de l'abbe Mourut ' is sadly a mixture of badly filmed eroticism mainly showing women's breasts and acts of cruelty. No spoilers except to say that the cutting off of a human ear leaving a man squirming and screaming is not for the faint hearted. Neither is the corporal punishment scenes inflicted on children, who because they are poor will go to hell with all of its punishments graphically described. This by a man who is part of the Catholic church. Catholicism takes quite a knocking in the film in general. Francis Huster plays a handsome young priest and he could have been directed better as he is a good actor, but the scenes he has in a garden as big as a forest with a young woman played by Gillian Hills is painfully bad to watch. The music soundtrack is terrible and there is even a snake to signify that this is a ' bad ' place. These scenes take up a lot of film time and drag it down, and the final scene involving a statue of the Virgin Mary does not help. To sum up the film is more failure than inspired cinema, and for whatever reason Franju lets himself down. A curious experience if you like the director, and there are scenes worth seeing but overall nowhere near to be rated highly.