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. 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, and moving inexorably towards tragedy. The Nun is a work of neo-classic integrity, its images washed in painterly blues and pastels, its emotional impact all the more powerful for its austerity.