Watched: 09/13/2025
Format: Criterion
Viewing; First
Director: Walerian Borowczyk
Uhm.
So.
Yeah.
And.
Right.
So.
Behind Convent Walls (1978) is a lot more what I had in mind when the word "Nunsploitation" entered my vocabulary a few weeks ago. For good or ill.
Minus The Sound of Music, coming from male filmmakers, there seems to be an inherent belief that there something unnatural about the lifestyle of nuns, and that a building full of nuns is also bursting at the seams with tension, ready for hanky-panky. Or, that nuns are already secretly engaging in hanky-panky in secret, with day-laborers or each other. Why this doesn't seem to apply to the occasional movie about priests or monks is, upon reflection, a bit silly. But I also can't think of many movies that are about monasteries that aren't about, like, something else that happens to occur at a monastery while it seems like if we get a movie about a convent, it's often about sexual repression.
I suspect the reasons are two-fold. 1) Nuns getting up to hanky-panky is just sexier for the straight male gaze than a couple of monks with friar haircuts making out. 2) There's some pretty wild stories about actual convents gone wild (see: The Devils). So there's some precedent.
Behind Convent Walls is not porn, but it sure is erotic and enters into YMMV territory with how it's viewed. It is trying to say something about the repression of the natural joy of life and instincts that adherence to chaste religious principals require - and that it's kind of dumb and ultimately bad. Here in 2025, and in America, that can seem quaint and so hanging the tremendous amount of nudity and sex in this movie on that topic can seem almost like excuse for the nudity and sex of this movie (some acts unsimulated). But I assume in 1970's Europe, as a late-20th Century Europe was feeling itself and riding on the notions of sexual liberation sweeping the globe, this was probably more than just an excuse for on-screen naughtiness.
But, yeah, very clearly someone was fetishizing nuns. I mean, full stop, this movie is that.
But it is funny how it feels like I haven't seen that many movies about Catholicism or nuns, but I kinda know the beats. There's a nun or nuns seeking liberation, particularly sexually, and an old abbess who is horrified, and must put a stop to it, and lacking any real power of her own, calls in crusty old men/ sexless clergymen who must punish young women for both having sexual feelings and/ or stirring ideas in them. And it always ends in tears. Except, again, The Sound of Music. (Those nuns just sent her to go nanny and get railed by Georg.)
This movie has a few parallel things occurring - young nuns repressed by the old abbess, a laborer who is nailing one nun, another nun who has a lover because she was forced into the convent by her parents to steal her money, nuns secretly having trysts together... yoga, masturbation... And one nun who goes nuts and thinks she has stigmata.
The *problem* with the film is that there are few discernible characters. I already have face-blindness when it comes to young people. Throw them into habits, and I had no idea who was who from scene to scene. They throw names around, but I had a hard time tracking who was who, and that felt unintentional.
Anyway, everything you will read elsewhere that happens in this movie sure does, which is why the YMMV note on the state of this as porn or not (I don't think so, but is porn-adjacent). If you're looking for a film with just buckets of nudity in the 1970's mode, plus flying-nun hats, I have amazing news.
If you're looking for insight into anything, not sure this is your film. But it is *very* pretty in that 1970's soft-core way I haven't given much thought to in this century, where you're impressed they had a real cinematographer who was focused on things that the movie did not demand (Jack Horner was right about what we'd lose with video).
Anyhoo, on to the next Nunsploitation, which I think co-stars an aging Richard Widmark, so I expect way less boobs.
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