The Film

After their recent release of the habit forming Killer Nun, Shameless return with their customary good taste and decorum to the subject of the sexual lives of deviant mistresses of the Lord. Emblazoned on their wonderful yellow sleeve and accompanying yellow case is the legend "Flay me baby, one more time". Flavia the Heretic will give nun fetishists some more cheap thrills through rampant fornication and inappropriate touching and it shares with Killer Nun the contention that all that sisterly seclusion can only lead to sexual frustration and impure thoughts. It is though a more serious beast in its intention to capture a sense of the historical treatment of women by religions both Christian and not.

We begin the film with a young Flavia helping a dying Muslim soldier in the middle of a killing field, much to her father's chagrin, and years later we rediscover that this zealot has dispatched his daughter to the sisterhood rather than to let her grow up in the real world. It is the first of many examples of ruthless male domination, and soon we are witnessing the punishment of a nun for lasciviousness as the local nobles observe her degrading torture. Flavia decides to escape the false piety that permits rape of the poor and punishes humanity in others, and she elopes with a Jewish scholar, but not for long. They are captured and she must atone for her sins. Flavia starts to appreciate the heretical Sister Agatha's views on the temporal authority around the convent and when the Muslim army invades she joins with them for revenge and desire.

Set in a time of holy wars, and schism in the church, Flavia is pitted against the male world which keeps her in seclusion whilst it has its way with the peasants and the unfortunate poor. The faith of these noblemen, like her father, is a huge hypocrisy which permits them to indulge their passions in excruciating torture of those they see as their slaves, or those that they judge to be wicked. The women are kept for them alone, and Flavia's first crime is to be with a Jew, not one of them, a status she later revels in as the concubine of the Muslim invader. Her revenge is to make her devout sisters become enslaved by their desires and to punish the patriarchs, and her empowerment leads her to being rejected by the new religion's followers too.

The serious interest in feminism of the story seems a little undermined by the copious flesh and the sexual torture scenes of the film, and sometimes this earnest intention feels like a bit of a fig leaf to hide the embarrassment of the film-maker. The torture sequence includes a nipple being first burnt and then cut off as the blood seeps from it, and the depravity does underline the male nobles' sadism but it leaves the audience as little better given the unflinching close ups of what we are shown. Any real empowerment of the heroine is also lost as she goes from madonna to whore, and then whore to martyr in a rather simplistic conclusion.

Flavia the Heretic has strong things to say about the use of religion as a tool by powerful men, and also how it is used to control women. In the end though, it isn't quite thought through enough and convincing in its feminism, and the movie reduces women to mere victims in search of an easy resolution and an uncomplicated message. Not an exploitation jewel or a truly serious film about patriarchy, and that is the film's basic failing as it tries, and fails, to reconcile these two impossible bedfellows.

The Disc

Shameless' cheerfully gaudy yellow box trademark continues, and the cover bearing the questionable slogan is reversible with a more restrained and infinitely better version on the other side. The main extras are trailers for other Shameless releases, which include the Frightened Woman, The Night Train Murders, Manhattan Baby and Killer Nun and a short trailer reel for Argent's films discs of The Nun and the Devil and Story of a Cloistered Nun.

The transfer for Flavia the Heretic is a mixed bag. The film is not presented anamorphically as claimed on the box and edges are not handled as subtly as I would have liked. Colours are a little worn, but the print quality is generally good and the image is sharpish in the centre of the frame with much less detail in the periphery. Importantly, the previous cuts to this film required by the BBFC are waived and the whole nipple cutting and horse de-bollocking is here in glorious colour for you to show your nana. The film is presented with an English dub which is clear and relatively distortion free but does have instances of background hum, pops and tape noise. Still, this sounds as if it is comparable to the existing Synapse R1 release with the exception of that disc being anamorphic.

Summary

A film that rather falls between two stools but is an intriguing attempt to lend credibility to exploitation film-making. Shameless continue their very worthwhile UK releases of Euro-Cult films and this is available at a nice price and uncut, shame about the anamorphic mix up though.

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