'The Convent' Is Mmm-Mmm Goethe!

Considering that it has stars as flashy as Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich, Manuel de Oliveira's latest release, "The Convent," dives suprisingly deep into the obscure. Even those blessed with an adequate understanding of Goethe's Faust, the Old and New Testaments and astrology may not be able to follow the characters' thoughts and actions as they glide through the rubble of an ancient Portugese convent.

The basic storyline is easy enough. American professor Michael Padovic (Malkovich) needs but a few more documents to prove the gist of his thesis that Shakespeare was of Spanish origin, not British. Supposedly, the archives of the convent of Arrabida contain the marriage contract of Jacques Perez, the man Padovic claims is the true Shakespeare--"Jacques Perez," when mangled into English, could conceivably sound like Shakespeare.

With laptop and wife Helene (Deneuve) in hand, Padovic travels to the nearly deserted convent, a cluster of decaying and frequently robbed churches, altars and sanctuaries on a hill overlooking the ocean.

The Padovics' arrival raises the convent's current population to six, a population large enough for a love triangle, or, in this film, a love square. The Guardian (the convent's general overseer), Baltar, falls in love with Helene and tries to set up the professor with the librarian, Piedade, in order to win Helene's affections for himself. Piedade, meanwhile, is a beautiful, porcelain-like young woman, of the purest mind and flesh; she often quotes passages of Faust in the original German and she loves Baltar with a fervent--and slightly incestuous--daughterly respect. Helene pretends to desire Baltar, but she'd rather get a little attention from her husband, who values his research more than anything, except, perhaps, the chance to deflower his librarian. The remaining two inhabitants of the convent, a pair of housekeepers, sneak around the buildings, spying on the others and whispering astrological secrets and curses in Portugese.

Both Malkovich and Deneuve portray their characters adequately; Padovic is as sexy and patronizingly intellectual as Malkovich's character in "Dangerous Liaisons," and Deneuve plays both the discontented wife and the love manipulator with the same blank, dark face.

Oliveira builds on the sexuality, religion and Faustian philosophy of the convent setting and tries to weave a new, intricate twist into the good vs. evil plot. But after 90 minutes of sparse dialogue, sparse interaction and even sparser coherence, "The Convent" ends with an inexplicable supernatural occurence--inexplicable in that it does not complete, expand or shed light on any previous theme. With its too frequent literary and biblical references and the overwhelmingly stark, gripping scenery, "The Convent" strives toward artsy epic but falls somewhere in the midst of artsy mediocrity.