Dark Habits

When Pedro Almodóvar was only eight years old, he was sent to religious boarding school by his parents, in the hope that he might one day join the clergy. Whilst Almodóvar never became a priest, he did make a film about heroin-shooting lesbian nuns who provide refuge to a showgirl on the run. This is Dark Habits (1983), the third feature film by the Spanish auteur, with a soundtrack featuring popular music, and an almost all-female cast. These two components evolved into defining habits of his later work, and become iconic features of his melodramatic, irreverent, and vibrant style.

Set almost entirely within a nunnery, Dark Habits faced controversy for its supposedly sacrilegious depiction of Catholicism. It was rejected by moral puritans—or, film programmers—at the Cannes Film Festival, before being accepted by the Venice Film Festival. The Italians had evidently learnt their lesson with Piero Paolo Pasolini. Having grown up Catholic, I would argue that far from being blasphemous, the film provides an entertaining and concise study of the close relationship between saints and sinners—and how women should be allowed to be both. Female outcasts find sanctuary with nuns, who treat them with grace, compassion and understanding, which is lacking in society.

As Mother Superior points out, Jesus didn’t die for saints, he died for sinners. The nuns are the groupies to the bad girls of Madrid. They offer love to all women who seek refuge, where others treat them with violence and abuse. Many of the nuns have had their own experience with sin, and some of them still practice their dark habits. However, they all protect their fellow sisters from the new Mother General, and live amongst each other without exercising any judgement. Whether their visions are sincere or caused by acid trips is besides the point: this is a group of vagabond women who, despite all of their flaws, share a deep sense of community and faith in their salvation.

Visually, the film is a gilded mirror of the 1980s: garish neon lights, bold purple eyeshadow, leather jackets, back-combed hair, leather trousers, cigarettes smoked inside and cherry vanilla cake. We see as much theatricality in the church as in a nightclub, infusing the film with high-voltage camp, where any moments of vulnerability are reserved for high angle shots. The images are consistently strong and punchy, much like the personalities of the nuns. They feel emotions intensely, and express them passionately, without any of the reserve expected by women who live amongst the expectations of men. The result is melodramatic—a religious and feminist soap opera—where nuns give each other the freedom to be themselves.

Dark Habits exists in a niche but brilliant canon of independent films centring the mysterious lives of nuns, from Robert Bresson’s Angels of Sin (1943) to Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), and Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961). This includes the many unrealised films about nuns, including a project by Hal Hartley about political revolutionaries who become nuns and start a micro-brewery in Brooklyn, which he instead released as a pulp novel titled Our Lady of the Highway. Dark Habits is referential to this cinema, as well as art history. There is one memorable scene of a nun holding up a facial print of her love interest, which references the Shroud of Turin, and resembles like the makeup prints made by artists such as Mira Schor or Sin Wai Kin.

Embracing spiritually through escapism, surrealism and pleasure, Dark Habits illuminates the challenge of seeking redemption in a hedonistic and modern world. It is a portrait of freedom lived by a closed-off group of women. Or, as the famous phrase goes: nuns where there are none wanted.