Toward Rustic Mind (Religiosity in Kachyňa's Night of a Bride)

Just a brief note on religiosity in Czech movies. The Night of a Bride (Noc nevěsty, 1967), a film directed by Karel Kachyňa (based on a novel by Jan Procházka), is a dark story set in 1950's Czech village. One of the movie's protagonists, the "lady" (orig. "slečna", starred by Jana Brejchová), is an extraordinary nun returning home. We can see her when she arrives in the village at the moment of a suicide of her father during the times of Soviet-style collectivisation in Czechoslovakia.

The story is set in Christmas Eve and its night. The "lady" is the antagonist of Picin (Mnislav Hofmann), the leader of the collectivisation in the village. Karel Kachyňa presents a specific kind of magic realism herein. Kachyňa's poetics is based on a thorough portrait of the characters with a wide use of symbolic shots and dream-like cuts. Nobody is a positive character, everyone has his personal vice or sin. But Picin and the "lady" are a distillate of rustic mind. They are individualistic, proud, die-hard but devoted. He is a Communist, she is a Catholic, both of them fully disperse their selfs in ideology.

The "lady" is a nun of a very extraordinary kind. She leads villagers to a semi-illegal night mass like a mystical prophet. Her image of a saint is almost perfect, including bleeding stigmata. But there is a profane power, a priest, who does not allow her to perform her role utterly. When she tries to get the wine during an Eucharist, the priest stops her and in the climax of the story he deprives her of her symbolic power. We can see that she is far behind the borders of a Christian devotion, she performs idolatry of herself. She really wants to become the bride of Him (not "Christ", but the absolute "Him") and to be integrated into the Divine. When villagers introduce her into the village church, they carry her on their shoulders like Divine Lady.

In my viewpoint this narrative is not a schematic duel of two fanaticisms (communism and religion). It is better to understand it as a manifestation of rustic mind. You can hardly understand the mind's actions, because despite of its eccentricity it is introvert. They reminds me the characters of stories by Veljko Petrović. The hearts of the both of protagonists are wild but obscure, never opened to a confession. They are condemned to psychical insulation, where no dialogue with God is possible. This is the reason, why the movie has to end in blood: the eccentricity of their characters (and their "fanaticism") is only a manifestation of their introversion and solitude.

In the movie, the eccentric religiosity is used as an instrument for better understanding of 1950's collectivisation of Czech village. It is not a critique of fanaticism (in such a manner argues "Bonjour Tristesse" for instance) but an outstanding portrait of rustic mind.