The Priestess

Vigen Cahldrani

Armenia

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Synopsis

After a near-fatal accident in present-day Armenia, a woman suffering from amnesia begins to remember a life that occurred many centuries ago.

REVIEW

In spite of its inevitable linearity, film can produce the illusion of time warps in stunning ways.  It gives us specific visual hooks that help us pretend-in ways prose, for example, cannot-that we can experience folds in time.  And so, from Fellini to Vigan Chaldranian, the director here, we have learned to accept these folds with little resistance.  In fact, the visions such editing gives us do correspond to the way our memory works, and our intuitions, our flashes, our déja vu.  And perhaps even, as this remarkable film suggests, our past lives. 

Chaldranian prefaces his film with a shot of a medieval manuscript and a text-over explaining that "...a medieval history of Armenia bears witness to the fact that the Armenians were first in history to adopt Christianity as a national religion in the year 301 A.D."  So we have the skeleton of the plot.  Next, we see a quote from Alexis de Toqueville, "History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."  We are thus somewhat prepared for a "copy" but perhaps not quite ready for the astonishingly beautiful "original"-the story of a pagan priestess convert that's cleverly tucked into a present-day narrative where a young woman takes on the identity of that very priestess after an automobile accident.  Of course that assumed (or emergent) identity is itself a "copy," a rendition imagined on the screen of what that past era might have been like.

Sometimes telling the past, if its been sparsely recorded, takes on the special effects of myth.  Chaldranian's cinematic vision of such a past seems inspired by the powerful images and deliberate pacing of such films as Parajanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," and Pasolini's "Medea."  "The Priestess" reminds me of Pasolini's intention to rewrite myth so that it would convey urgent messages about the present, messages we had somehow not yet grasped.  This stunning, powerful film depicts the violent shift (in the second or third century, C.E.) in Armenian theology, ideology and ritual to the radical new beliefs of Christianity. So much of Armenia's previous Mithra worship is conserved that the new religion looks, but perhaps doesn't feel, much like the old one.  Simultaneously, the film's modern-day plot questions the capacity of our science to comprehend what in final analysis is still the mystery of the organism, a mystery we may be living over and over again.

-Beverly Allen