**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Graham Faulkner, Judi Bowker, Alec Guinness, Leigh Lawson
screenplay by Susio Cecchi D'Amico, Kenneth Ross, Lina Wertmüller, Franco Zeffirell
directed by Franco Zeffirelli
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So: how do you get the young people back into church when they'd rather be out running wild and getting it on? If you're Mel Gibson, you break out the whips and chains and pour on the gore (an effective approach, to be sure), but if you're Franco Zeffirelli, you choose another path. You'll recall that Zeffirelli was the chap who brought kids back to Shakespeare by turning Romeo and Juliet into a make-out movie, scoring a few Oscar nominations in the bargain–but you can make certain sexy allowances for Shakespeare that you can't with the word of God. Against all odds, the man managed to make a religious tract in tune with the hormonal post-hippie youth of 1973 called Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which cleverly addresses the tender feelings of burgeoning bodies while glorifying a chaste life in the service of the Lord. Like Romeo and Juliet, though it's ludicrous in the extreme, its combination of low cunning and gawky earnestness makes it fascinating as a curio, if not as a fully functioning film on its own.
This is the tenth-century tale of a young man named Francesco (Graham Faulkner), soon to be known as St. Francis of Assisi. Beaten down by the wars, he returns to his greedy textile-merchant father and is appalled at the disparity between him and his have-not employees. So he does what any self-respecting disaffected youth does: he rebels, throwing his father's finery into the street and renouncing his materialistic ways. He is, as the DVD copy suggests, "history's first 'drop-out,'" and so he starts a renegade order of monks devoted to living without possessions just as the birds and animals do–but not before several instant-conversion scenes, including one with Clare (Judi Bowker), the willowy beauty who will become a saint in her own right. Thus he and his disciples fly in the face of church convention–and eventually square off against the Pope (a dazed Alec Guinness) in an attempt to take the alienating riches out of religion.
Notice the clever subterfuge? You haven't seen a rebel until you've seen St. Francis: part Holden Caulfield, part Rod McKuen, he gently battles the system so that all of God's creatures can live in peace and harmony. And while it's not exactly spelled out, most of Francesco's opponents are adults, starting with his parents and going on to the grasping grownups in his village. They regard his attempts to rebuild a ruined church crazy, they consider his mission of poverty absurd, and in general, they just don't get it, man! No flower-powered youth could possibly turn down such a hero–at least, that's what Zeffirelli is banking on, diverting as he does the restless impulses of youth back into the apparently stuffy confines of religion. Granted, since this is the early Seventies, the do-your-own-thing shagginess and Donovan's hilariously po-faced chamber-folk songs soften the rebellion, but the strategy is unmistakable even at this late date.
The film's masterstroke lies in its sensuous approach to unsexy material. Francesco and his gang are the most bodily monks in the history of cinema–there's no transcendence of the physical plane here, but a lot of our hero standing in the middle of fields with arms outstretched and letting the air pass by his body. It's with such images that Zeffirelli manages to address the bodies of young people without being explicit; there's even fawn-like St. Clare, who mostly stands around looking gorgeous. Clare offers the most Freudian scene in the film when she allows Francis to shear off her golden tresses before her renunciation, and the loving approach is unmistakably erotic–and erotic in a way that can be immediately disavowed as just a boy and girl happening to touch. Uptight youth everywhere can swoon to this film with a clear conscience, which is exactly the point of the whole movie: it's about taking the electric current of rock-age youth and trapping it in the old circuit of the church, and it's fascinating–if delusional nonetheless.
THE DVD
Paramount's Brother Sun, Sister Moon disc does all right for itself. The 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced image is pretty decent, with colours that are vivid without looking oversaturated and definition that is generally quite good, although detail can be somewhat indistinct in a handful of wide shots. While the accompanying Dolby 2.0 mono soundtrack gets the job done, it's a tad faint and slightly soft. There are no extras–no trailer, even.
121 minutes; PG; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
