Agnes of God (1985)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There are films that you hear about, forget and rediscover later. The title “Agnes of God” did remind me of something, but didn’t know what exactly. I still recorded it without knowing why. It’s while watching it that I realized that I had completely forgotten the film’s strong Montréal connections: helmed by Canadian-born directing chameleon Norman Jewison, the film is not only set in Montréal with recognizable French-Canadian accents everywhere in the background, but it’s clearly, visibly shot in Montréal with its mid-1980s city logos and cars and slushy winters. Meg Tilly is quite good here in the title role, especially considering that we never see anything but her face and hands. Elsewhere in the cast, both Anne Bancroft (as a mother superior) and Jane Fonda (as a hard-driven psychiatrist) get great roles. All the Anglophone actors can be easily spotted by the fact that their French is phonetically pronounced mush. Narratively, the ambiguous ending is a forgone conclusion the moment the film sets up its characters—we know it’s going to end up with a could-it-be-rational-or-could-it-be-not, in order to make everyone happy (it’s the default conclusion of any religious-or-reality movie). Still, the journey is interesting, and it’s worth noting that the three lead performances in the film are all from women—the men are supporting characters at best. Despite a muddy yet predictable conclusion and a somewhat esoteric and difficult subject matter, Agnes of God is frequently interesting—for the acting, for the setting, sometimes for the drama itself. I’m not sure I’m going to forget it again.