Rivette's adaptation of Denis Diderot's novel of eighteenth-century convent life was banned for two years in France for its supposedly excessive attack on the Church. However, Rivette's subject here is not religion, per se, but the arbitrary exercise of power-and women's particular vulnerability to it. Anna Karina portrays a beautiful young woman, Suzanne, whose parents force her to enter a convent, since they have no money for a dowry for marriage. She desperately tries to escape as she is shunted from convent to convent. Each is remarkably different from the last-one, a true prison, another, an arena for sexual hysteria; what remains constant is Karina/Suzanne herself, pure in her longing for freedom. As Molly Haskell has observed, Suzanne, unlike most women in literature, desires freedom for its own sake: "She seeks liberty rather than romance or security or rest or the other pragmatic goals which are considered to be the instinctive aspirations of women." And so Suzanne must move inexorably towards tragedy. The Nun is a work of neo-classic austerity and integrity whose emotional impact is all the more powerful for that. The plastic beauty of the images-washed in painterly blues and pastels-is beautifully rendered in the new print we present tonight.