Don't Deliver Us From Evil

Spurred on by prohibited texts, two rebellious convent schoolgirls, Anne – dark-haired, awkward looking – and Lore – blonde, more conscious of her body and how to use it – decide to dedicate themselves to Satan and, over the course of a summer, escalate from relatively innocent jeux interdits – drinking and smoking, exploring their burgeoning sexuality and enjoying private jokes at the expense of their curé and confessor etc. – to animal killing, fire-raising and murder, all leading to a shocking, unforgettable conclusion.

With its subject matter and convincingly underage-looking leads – though a read of the essay included among the DVD extras confims that Jeanne Goupil and Catherine Wagener were aged 19 and 20 at the time – Don't Deliver Us From Evil / Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal is the sort of film that likely could not be made by an English-language filmmaker in 1971, nevermind today's climate. (It should be noted that the reason the film was refused a visa in its country of origin for a time, leading distributor/film-maker/impresario/all-round good guy Antony Balch to promote it in the UK as "The French Film Banned in France" with an alluring image of Wagener, was more down to its anti-authoritarian and anti-clerical stance than its borderline paedophilic scenario.)

Yet, remarkably, the film has a lot going for it beyond simple shock value, with convincing performances – the contrast between the the amateur Goupil and professional Wagener adding an extra edge – and character psychology – interestingly two common traits amongst serial killers in adolescence are apparently tortuting animals and pyromaniac tendencies – evocation of its distinctive social and cultural milieux – one thinks of the likes of Claude Chabrol's Helene cycle and Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales here – and, above all, engaging direction by first-timer Joel Séria.

Lack of experience with the filmic medium here becomes a positive asset as a disregard for conventional practices of mise-en-scene and editing creates a dreamlike world where normal rules of time and place do not apply and connections take place at a higher level, as when – for example – the girls' explorations of the abandoned servant's house they make into their den segues seamlessly into another expedition into the convent school's attic and its forbidden secrets.

As a whole, Don't Deliver Us From Evil / Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal comes across as something akin to Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows as Luis Buñuel or Catherine Breillat might have imagined it – no bad thing, especially to those nay-sayers who would deny that European cult cinema of this sort has anything to actually say.

Indeed, within the director interview contained among the DVD extras, Séria identifies the film as having a strong quasi-autobiographical element, in terms of making use of his own difficult relationship with his father, an-ex prisoner of war who could not appreciate that his son found boarding school to be a similarly repressive environment, along with discussing his own background – more theatrical than cinematic – and identifying some of the film's key reference points, including Buñuel, Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire and the Comte de Lautréamont.

Jeanne Goupil discusses how she became involved with the production as a film-loving art student who knew next to nothing about acting, but was nevertheless given freedom to interpret the role in her own way, with her paradoxically consciously unselfconscious performance more than repaying Séria's faith in her and leading to future collaborations and a long-term relationship. British true crime and cult film enthusiast Paul Buck, meanwhile, provides background context on the film, suggesting strong parallels between its protagonists and New Zealand murderesses Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, as later depicted in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures.

Also included are a useful text essay; a gallery of posters, stills, lobby cards and other promotional materials; and the ever-evolving Mondo Macabro trailer reel.

Audio-visual quality is up to the usual standards we've come to expect from the company. With a reference quality presentation pretty much out of the qustion given the age and circumstances of the production, the print, transfer – in the original aspect ratio and enhanced for widescreen – and sound are about as good as could be hoped for, providing a particularly good showcase for Marcel Combes impressive cinematography, with plenty of night for night shooting and set-ups that must have been a challenge to light.

Mondo Macabro website