What started as a practical joke on a friend who had left the encyclopedists' circle around Diderot, ended up as a French literary landmark:"The Nun". Inspired by a true story, Diderot's novel is a first-person narration of the odyssey of a young, beautiful girl, Suzane Simonin, whose parents force her into a convent in order to save the family's finances from bankruptcy. In his faithful adaptation for the screen, Jacques Rivette proceeded from Diderot's indictment of an inhuman monastic system to a philosophical study of the dialectis of faith and liberation, of the oppressive mechanism of classical representation to which he submits his experimental directorial strategy. And he offered Anna Karina the opportunity to become "the flesh and soul" of a masterpiece, depicting a woman's resistance to her social destiny which allowed her to exist only as an "unholy nun" or a "holy whore".
- Nikos Savvatis
