La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret

An adaptation of Zola's novel by one of the world's most idiosyncratic and fascinating directors. As always, Franju finds fantasy and surreal images in the everyday world, and taking a 'naturalistic' anti-clerical novel - in which a young priest, obsessed with the Madonna, is led to a far more openly physical passion for a young girl - he creates an amoral, poetic vision of a world where religious dogma and fanaticism are imbued with a sense of Gothic expressionism. Faithful to Zola, the film is nevertheless recognisably a creation of Franju: beautiful, bizarre and lucid.