Sacred Flesh
UK 1999
Reviewed by Linda Ruth Williams
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Sister Elizabeth, the mother superior of a medieval convent, has visions of Mary Magdalene and a skeletal dead nun. Father Henry, the abbot, and his servant Richard are summoned by the convent's abbess to help with the hysteria spreading among the order.
Elizabeth recounts the confessions and fantasies of the nuns, flagellating herself and becoming excited as she does so: Sister Sarah masturbates; Sisters Mary and Helena flagellate one another and then have sex. Sister Catherine is violated by Fathers James and Peter. Finally, Sisters Jane, Teresa and Helen engage in three-way sex and violate Sister Ann after tying her to a cross. Elizabeth writhes violently in her cell and, as she dies, is tormented by visions of a crucified woman and Christ's beating Sacred Heart.
Review
Even in the lives of Sight and Sound readers there may be a place for the kind of film you watch on a Friday night with a six-pack and a takeaway meal. If you want bonking and bondage with your beer and biriani, then Sacred Flesh may be the film for you. The trouble is, one suspects director Nigel Wingrove had higher hopes for his film, judging from the extensive sexual philosophising on the nature and nurture of repression which punctuates the action.
Sacred Flesh is the latest move in a notorious career of censor-baiting and sleaze-purveying which has established Wingrove as mogul of Salvation Films, the company behind neo-exploitation labels Redemption, Jezebel, Purgatory, Carnal and Sacrament. Wingrove specialises in mad, sexy nuns and the censorship challenges they provoke. Visions of Ecstasy (a lurid, short treatise on the erotic visions of St Teresa of Avila) failed to get a video certificate from the British Board of Film Classification on grounds of blasphemy, so he gamely took it to the European Court of Human Rights in what proved to be a test case for judging comparative standards of visual materials in the EC. He lost.
Now Sacred Flesh, endowed with the unexpected respectability of a cinematic release, has installed the hallucinating mother superior of a hysterically randy medieval convent as Teresa's wayward stable-mate. Exemplary Salvation fodder, Sacred Flesh is replete with deranged nymphets tearing off their habits and lasciviously mounting giant crosses, its overwrought screenplay fleshed out by a range of underwrought acting styles.
The structure is simple: mother superior Sister Elizabeth and a demonic Mary Magdalene (reconstructed in Elizabeth's imagination back into the whore she originally was) debate the merits of desire and the dangers of chastity on the blue-screen backed stage of a heavenly antechamber. Mary reminds Elizabeth that since her convent is nothing but a seething mass of cocooned desire she too is the victim and agent of her own wanton desires. Elizabeth then narrates four fantasy erotic set pieces, punctuated by discussions between, on the one hand, the convent's old abbess and a priest and, on the other, Elizabeth and a peculiar dead nun who looks and sounds like the mutant love child of Darth Vader and Dr Who's Davros.
The sex scenes unfold with a formulaic pornographic logic, starting simply and building to fireworks at the end, giving the audience the chance to catch their breath (as it were) by passing the time with talk and character establishment. But Wingrove knows what his punters want from a kinky convent flick, so the Sapphic pent-up desires run rampant. From solitary nuns masturbating to three-way lesbian sex and a climactic nun-on-nun crucifix-bondage scene, the porn scenarios tread a fine line between soft- and hardcore. Brief flashes of female genitalia, which until recently were cast well beyond the pale of certification, are given screen space, as are the whip and the rope. Sacred Flesh could easily have been titled Whipping in Wimples, so fond is it of women engaging in flagellation as their semi-nakedness is framed by disparate items of ecclesiastic apparel.
So will Sacred Flesh be in everyone's list of the worst ten films of this year? Probably. But that's not to say there isn't a lot that is both likeable and amusing about it. If the film has a sexual theory, it's volcanic: enforced virginity only bottles up desire, which will explode all the more violently the harder you contain it, a harmlessly liberal philosophy if ever there was one.
The film's faults, though many, are mitigated by the theatrical pleasures of a ludicrously purple script (hell-bent on alliterating itself into the record books) and a porno-glam mise en scène which ensures every nun comes equipped with her own generous make-up bag and pubic depilation kit. Judged on its own terms, Sacred Flesh knows what it's trying to do and does it rather inventively on a tiny budget. As long as audiences are more prepared for a pornographic Carry on Convent than Ken Russell's The Devils or Powell and Pressburger's classic of the genre Black Narcissus (lipstick quota notwithstanding), this may be a camp cult classic in the making.
Credits
- Director
- Nigel Wingrove
- Producer
- Louise Ross
- Screenplay
- Nigel Wingrove
- Directors of Photography
- Chris Herd
- James MacDonald
- Geoff Mills
- Editors
- Chris Shaw
- Jake West
- Art Director
- Nigel Wingrove
- Music
- Steve Pittis
- Band of Pain
- ©Salvation Films Ltd.
- Production Companies
- Salvation Films in association with The 400 Company present a Gothica production
- Executive Producer
- Mark Sloper
- Design Director
- Chris Jennings
- Design
- Arundi Asregadoo
- Design Production Manager
- Dallas Synnott
- Effects Editor
- Miles Green
- Editbox Editor
- Tim Smith
- Special Effects
- M2 Television
- Graphic Design
- John Murrell
- Set Designer
- Tony Gibas
- Styling
- Dena Costello
- Make-up
- Liberty Shaw
- Sally Smith
- Title Sequence
- Editor:
- Jake West
- Graphics:
- Lisa Lloyd
- Sound
- Tom Webster
- Dubbing Mixers
- Julian Kyle
- Nigel Glynn-Davies
- Equestrian Handlers
- Sue Edwards
- Sian Fletcher
- Cast
- Sally Tremaine
- Sister Elizabeth
- Moyna Cope
- abbess
- Simon Hill
- Father Henry, the abbot
- Kristina Bill
- Mary Magdalene
- Rachel Taggart
- Catechism
- Eileen Daly
- Repression
- Daisy Weston
- Sister Brigitte
- Moses Rockman
- Richard
- Emily Booth
- Williams girl
- Willow
- herself
- Laura Plair
- succubi
- Leasa Carlyon
- peasant
- Louise Linehan
- Maid Marion
- Mary Grant
- Daisy Weston
- Leasa Carlyon
- nuns
- Nicole Bouchet
- incarcerated nun
- Louise Ross
- mad nun
- Cindy Read
- whipping nun
- Michelle Thorne
- Sister Sarah
- Marc Morris
- Chris Charlston
- inquisitors
- Hannah Callow
- Sister Helena
- Amanda Dawkins
- Sister Mary
- Majella Shepherd
- Novice Catherine
- Christopher Adamson
- Father Peter
- Philip Serfaty
- Father James
- Nicole Bouchet
- Sister Helen
- Cassandra Bochsler
- Sister Teresa
- Anneka Svenska
- Sister Ann
- Sarah McLean
- Sister Jane
- Cindy Read
- female Christ
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Salvation Films
- 75 minutes
- Cuts substituted with new material
- In Colour