The Nun's Story

It is in the Congo that Sister Luke comes into her own. She falls in love with the country and its people as soon as she steps off the boat. She is sent to the European hospital to assist Dr. Fortunati, a brilliant, cynical surgeon who immediately sees through Sister Luke and understands her better than she understands herself. The meeting of minds between these two is awesome to watch and in itself makes the movie worth seeing. Dr. Fortunati, brilliantly played by Peter Finch, tells Sister Luke time and again that she will never be the kind of nun her convent expects her to be. The sexual tension between the two is evident but downplayed; Dr. Fortunati knows it's impossible and Sister Luke simply refuses to acknowledge it. The climax comes when Sister Luke is ordered back to the mother house in Belgium, and we suspect that Dr. Fortunati may have had a hand in it, to force her to face up to the fact that she is more nurse than nun.

The year is 1939 and World War II is about to begin. Sister Luke, chafing at the constraints of the mother house, is drawn into the war in ways her convent never imagined or would sanction. She assists a young lay nurse, who looks up to her as a role model, to work for the Resistance. She is glad when a German woman dies in the convent hospital. And she is finally forced to see inside herself and realize that while she may be able to accept chastity and poverty, obedience is impossible. At this point Sister Luke realizes she can no longer go on living a lie. The scenes in which her confessor and Reverend Mother Emmanuel attempt to dissuade her from leaving the convent are the most powerful in the film. "You joined the convent to be a nun, not a nurse", remonstrates Reverend Mother. But this is precisely where she's wrong; Sister Luke is much more a nurse than she will ever be a nun. After 17 years at war with herself, Sister Luke signs the papers severing her from her convent, and goes out into the world.

Hepburn's performance in a role which demands so much from her is incredible; we not only feel but share all her conflict and inner pain. There is no way she could come across as a plain, mousy nun (Hepburn would be drop-dead beautiful even in a burlap sack) but her acting is so convincing that we forget she is the gorgeous Audrey Hepburn and see her only as a soul in torment. Peter Finch is excellent as Dr. Fortunati and all of the minor characters are very well portrayed, but the real soul of the movie is Edith Evans as Reverend Mother Emmanuel, concerned with the spiritual health of her flock, and despairing yet fatalistic as one of her flock inexorably slips away. The movie is long (two and a half hours) but it's never boring; it grabs our interest from the opening frame and holds it to the final frame in which Hepburn turns a corner out of the convent grounds and out of our sight. The one jarring note, especially after 40 years, is the patronizing paternalism of the Belgian colonization in the Congo; except for the education and medical care provided by the Church, the cruelty of Belgian colonial occupation was legendary and makes us wonder what Sister Luke's fate would have been if she had returned to the Congo after she left the convent. At the end of the film we are left with great respect and admiration for an incredibly strong yet fallible young woman whose journey to self-knowledge is a life-long project.

It is this portion of the movie that may be of interest to Africanists. The scenes set in Congo were filmed there, evidently in Kisangani. There is something of a documentary quality to much of this part of the film: Congolese people at work and play, life around a missionary hospital, colonial officials and uniformed native soldiers, colonial architecture, etc. It is really a sort of window on the past, and while the movie is not about the Belgian Congo, it does give a good idea of what part of the Belgian Congo looked like, and what life was like for the urban inhabitants in the Belgian Congo. As far as I know, this is the only movie you are likely to find in your local video store that has anything like that. Recommended for anyone interested in African history; and the part about the nun and the ex-pat doctor makes a pretty good movie.