Sous le soleil de Satan (1987)

The advertisement said this movie won the Palm D'Or at Cannes Film Festival, so I wondered what this would be like.

This wasn't an easy movie to understand, with dialogues like poetry. Gérard Depardieu plays a village priest called Dossignan who is told to go another village. On his way (for he likes to walk), exhausted, he meets Satan in the form of a farmer (well, sort of) who tells him the shortcut. Satan kisses him and since then he has gifts, like the ability to know other people's problems without being told first and to raise a boy from death. In the latter act, he pays it with his own life.



Another important character is Mouchette, a 16 year old girl who has slept with several men and is pregnant by one of them. She kills the father of her child and committed suicide after meeting Dossignan, who fails to save her. The scene where she washes off the blood from her shoe is somehow beautiful, while the scene where Satan tells the priest to look at him is scary.