Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Leon Morin, Priest

A year after redefining movie cool in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo donned a priest’s robes to star in this Jean-Pierre Melville classic about the relationship between a lonely widow and a man of the cloth in an occupied village during World War II. The dialogue covers a lot of religious and philosophical topics, ranging form the nature of God to the role man plays in His ultimate plan, but the debates of the mind take a back seat to the passionate sparks that fly between Belmondo and his costar, the beautiful Emmanuelle Riva. This isn’t your usual melodrama, though,and the turns the story takes are always unexpected.

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