Year: 1974
Duration: 01:41:13
Directed by: Richard Griffin
Actors: Florinda Bolkan, María Casares, Claudio Cassinelli, Anthony Higgins, Spiros Focás
Language: Italian
Country: Italy | France
Also known as: Flavia la monaca musulmana, Flavia the Rebel Nun, Flavia, Priestess of Violence, The Muslim Nun
Description: Southern Italy, the beginning of the thirteenth century. By the will of the powerful father freedom-loving Flavia (F. Balkan who played in Last House on the Beach and The Trap) was sent to a convent. A woman reacts to the injustice and cruelty of the “male” world. She escapes from the monastery, but has been caught and punished. Then she becomes stronger in hating of religion and men. Flavia is adjacent to the order of Muslim soldiers, who raid the Italian coast. She becomes the lover of their captain and leads his men to the assault of his monastery, and then – her father’s estate. And no one will be spared from “Flavia the Heretic”
Review: The film “Flavia the Heretic” today for some reason is often attributed to a kind of sub-genre «nunsplotation», popular in the 70’s of the last century. Indeed, some of the formal features allow you to do: action, much of which takes place in a convent, obsession, violence, a large number of erotic scenes … But behind this outer layer in the film Gianfranco Mingotstsi hiding something else – an attempt to answer the question of how far can a man in defense of his personal liberty, and is there any limit of its price?
To do this, the filmmakers decide to go to the Renaissance, which modern man is presented as something sublime and bright, thanks to the art of Michelangelo and Petrarch, Raphael, and Rabelais, Cervantes and Cellini … But in the movie «Flavia» this world is presented to the audience its underside: dirty vile, deprived clue about humanism, sewage stinks, full of disease and is not adjusted for the existence of the individual. It can survive only together, obviously taking the rules of a particular social group: morality, culture, and customs. The personality has to be dissolved in a crowd or disappear.
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