Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From her first day in the convent, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) finds it harder than her sisters do to give up the natural for the spiritual life. Of her three vows-poverty, chastity, obedience-she can keep two without much difficulty, but the third is her undoing. She cannot manage to keep the silence that is required of all novices; she cannot bear to stop whatever she is doing when the bell of command is rung; she cannot persuade her thoughts from memories and objects, "the vanity of this world." Her nature rebels because her will insists on nothing less...
...medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture's painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch the heart...
...cool; and so is the picture. She has the presence of the sprite, not the presence of the spirit. Calm and exquisite in her habit, she looks most of the time like nothing more troubled or troubling than (if such a thing were possible) a recruiting poster for a convent...
...famed Sotheby's (pronounced Sutherbees) auction house. Prize catch of the lot was clearly Peter Paul Rubens' Adoration of the Magi. A 10 ft. 9¼ in. by 8 ft. panel painted by Rubens at the peak of his powers in 1634 for Louvain's Convent of the Dames Blanches, it is considered by dealers not only the best Rubens in Britain but the most important old master to be put on the block at Sotheby's in over 30 years...
Parental Clay. In the France of 1908 -such a well-tended garden that it was almost a crime for a child to pick a flower -the De Beauvoirs tried to maintain rather than seek status. A soso lawyer. Papa was worldly, intelligent and a gifted amateur actor. Convent-bred Mama was pious, temperamentally capricious, and terribly afraid of making a social gaffe. When the couple engaged in loud-voiced wrangles, little Simone was bitterly disillusioned; parents were not gods, but common clay. At eight, the embryo novelist wrote a woefully sentimental saga about The Misfortunes of Marguerite...