Director/Screenplay – Joel Seria, Producer – Bernard Legargeant, Photography – Marcel Combes, Music – Dominique Ney, Special Effects – Roland Urban. Production Company – Societe Generale du Production/Les Productions Tanit.
Cast
Jeanne Goupil (Anne de Boissy), Catherine Wagener (Lore Fournier), Gerard Darrieu (Emile), Bernard Dheran (The Motorist), Marc Dudicourt (The Chaplain), Jean Pierre Helbert (Count Pierre de Boissy), Veronique Silver (Countess de Boissy), Henry Poirier (Henry Fournier), Michel Robin (Leon), Nicole Merouze (Mme Fournier), Rene Berthier (Gustave)
Plot
Anne de Boissy and Lore Fournier, two teenage girls in a Catholic boarding school, have sworn themselves to Satan and are determined to conduct acts of mischief. These including getting others in trouble for their acts and making false confessions to the priest. While home on holidays, they conduct further mischief, including tempting men with their sexuality and killing the manservant’s pet birds, culminating in an act of murder.
Don’t Deliver Us From Evil was a film of considerable Censorship Controversy when it came out. It received harsh censorship ratings in most countries, while being banned outright in its native France. It was the first film from director Joel Seria who has made seven other films up until 2010, although all of these others are comedies. Seria did subsequently marry Jeanne Goupil, who plays the lead role of Anne in the film.
Don’t Deliver Us From Evil is ostensibly a film about Satanists. It is important to remember when it came out that Devil Worship on the screen was typified by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and the much less sinister, more anodyne depictions in earlier works like Eye of the Devil (1967) and The Devil Rides Out (1968). The clichés of Satanists in black and scarlet robes conducting ceremonies with human or animal sacrifices around pentacles would still not be codified until the occult boom that was just starting to take off in films like Brotherhood of Satan (1971), released three months later, Race with the Devil (1975) and others.
Thus what we end up with is less the Devil Worship we know than a kind of perverse anti-Catholicism. The two girls’ acts of rebellion in the initial scenes at least are the petty rebellion of a Catholic boarding school – getting others in trouble in class, making up confessions to the priest, reading erotic stories and tattle-telling on seeing two nuns kissing. When the girls set out to hold their own Satanist ceremony later in the show, it is something still rooted in Catholicism where they steal an old cassock, candles and a ciborium.
Best friends (l to r) Lore (Catherine Wagener) and Anne (Jeanne Goupil(The girls (l to r) Catherine Wagener and Jeanne Goupil approach farmhand Gerard Darrieu with malice in mind
It is a film filled with all manner of dangerous tensions. Joel Seria shoots in a very naturalistic manner. The scene where Jeanne Goupil goes and confesses to the priest (Marc Dudicourt) about seeing the two nuns kissing broods with sexual undercurrent – both in the sense of forbidden secrets unveiled and in the way that Seria’s camera focuses on the faces of Goupil and Dudiourt in two-shots, seeming to draw out a breathless eroticism in the telling.
This becomes even more disturbed when it comes to the scene where the two girls go to farmhand Gerard Darrieu and tease him with their flirtatious sexuality, including Catherine Wagener lying back flashing her panties and then running away as he pursues and then starts to tear her clothes off and forces himself on her. The scene is made all the more disturbing by the indeterminate ages of the girls – Jeanne Goupil was 21 at the time and Catherine Wagener nineteen but both easily look as though they are only about 13-14 years old.
The girls’ games become increasingly more malicious – setting bales of hay on fire, poisoning and snapping the necks of the manservant’s beloved birds. This all culminates in the scene where they take a man (Bernard Dheran) whose car has broken down back to their retreat, where he comes onto Catherine before Jeanne beats his head in with a piece of wood and they decide to dump the body in the lake. The ending of the film where [PLOT SPOILERS] the girls, fearful of apprehension by the authorities, light themselves on fire during a school recital, is quite shocking.
There are claims made that Joel Seria based the film on the Parker-Hulme murder case that later became the basis of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994), although I am unable to tell if this is just someone attributing connection after the fact and cannot find any direct quotes where Joel Seria states that a case that took place halfway around the world was his source of inspiration. Certainly, there are obvious comparisons to Heavenly Creatures, made over two decades later, which also features two girls defiant of society and similarly culminates in a murder. The main difference is that the girls here seem more wantonly malicious, whereas the two in Heavenly Creatures are a good deal more innocent. Heavenly Creatures also tends to be far more sympathetic to its characters and almost reaches the point of seeing the murder as a necessary act against a society that prevented their forbidden love, whereas Don’t Deliver Us From Evil wants to rub our faces in shock and defiance of good manners, along with a certain degree of Catholic blasphemy.
