Here Below
Here Below
| 18 January 2012 (USA)
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The true story of a nun who betrayed a network of Resistance fighters after having a passionate but doomed love affair with a priest during the Second World War.

Reviews
Franp Franp

This film is inspired very freely by a real fact of the French Resistance: the affair of Sister Marie Philomène. The documentation on this case is very low; All that is known is that Sister Marie Philomène (of her surname Lucie Million) was arrested by a group of resistance fighters in the Dordogne on 24 January 1944 and executed for treason on 8 February. All the rest of the story is pure fiction.The fiction imagines therefore a failed love affair of the nun for a priest engaged in resistance.The character of the nun is probably the best : her amorous enlightenment, her naivety, her stubbornness, her wound, her moral decomposition, her desire for revenge are transcribed brilliantly.The other characters are unfortunately much more dull, notably the priest whose character is cruelly lacking in thickness.The problem is there: the historical context and the secondary characters (that is, all characters except the nun) are under-exploited; They serve only as a pretext to relate the pangs of an amorous disappointment that could very well have been transposed to the identical in a bourgeois of the 21st century or a Parisian nineteenth-century worker. The originality of the theme, the religious background of the character, is ultimately very little exploited, unless the director wanted to demonstrate that the nuns are women like the others, crossed by the same feelings and the same weaknesses.

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GUENOT PHILIPPE

The tale of a nun in love with a priest, during WW2, in France. I like this unusual story, very dark, downbeat at the most. But it could have been a little longer, and the characterization also more emphasized on. The acting is well played. A little french film speaking of an unusual scheme. About french resistance, we are far from L'ARMEE DES OMBRES. I find the actress very good as the nun character. Yes, the only drawback of this film, the only weakness, would be the lightness of the script. Jean-Pierre Denis has already made more films, all in the same kind. Interesting stuff always Worth seeing.

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