听 User Rating 
Contains mild peril
Made between their metaphysical love story A Matter of Life and Death and their ballet extravaganza The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger's delirious Technicolour melodrama Black Narcissus continues to weave its intoxicating spell nearly 60 years after its original release. Filmed not on location in India, but at Pinewood studios, it's the wonderfully bizarre story of a group of nuns led by the ambitious Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), who succumb to hysteria when they attempt to set up a remote convent in the Himalayas.
This digitally restored print allow us to luxuriate in Black Narcissus's sensual riches, and particularly the way the filmmakers and their Oscar-winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff use colour to convey states of mind (no wonder that Scorsese is such a fan of Powell's work). Here red is associated with the increasingly deranged Sister Ruth (a brilliant Kathleen Bryon), who boldly smears lipstick over her mouth and dons a livid crimson dress in a bid to seduce the strapping government agent (David Farrar). Emerald greens meanwhile predominate in the lush flashbacks to Clodagh's failed courtship in Ireland.
"AN EROTIC CHARGE THAT'S SO OFTEN LACKING"
The film is powered by a series of juxtapositions and opposites: passion and restraint, duty and desire, id and ego, physical and spiritual, Englishness and foreignness, wilderness and civilization, Christian and mystical, male and female, adult and child. Are perhaps Clodagh and Ruth different facets of the same character, the former's stiff-upper-lip mentality contrasting with the latter's emotional outpourings? Culminating in a operatic cliff-top confrontation between these two figures, Black Narcissus has an erotic charge that's to this day been so often lacking in British cinema.
