Format: Internet video on laptop.
After yesterday’s film, it makes a kind of sense to watch a film that is very much in the same sort of vein but with far more artistic credibility. Of course, I didn’t have anything left on The List that really fit the bill…until the news that the new edition had been released. One of those new films is The Devils, the often-banned, X-rated psychodrama by auteur filmmaker Ken Russell. Once I saw that had made it, I knew that was the film for today. You never know what you’ll get with a Ken Russell film, but there are a few things you can guess pretty accurately. Any Ken Russell film will be wildly inappropriate, flamboyant beyond all measure, disturbing, irreverent, and overtly sexual. The Devils is not only all of that, but far more extreme than any of the other Russell film I’ve seen to this point.
The prime mover of the plot is the battle between the Protestants and Catholics in France under the rule of Louis XIII. As the film starts, we see Louis himself (Graham Armitage) involved in a sort of flamboyant gay pageant on the birth of Venus, with the king as Venus. What follows is something like a power play by Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). Richelieu wishes for increased power by destroying the walls of many of the towns under the pretense of wanting to prevent a Huguenot uprising from gathering in the towns . Louis agrees, but leaves out the city of Loudun, since he had promised to leave those walls intact.
