“The Nun’s Epic” is probably Audrey Hepburn’s best film and by far the one which shows to best accomplish her spacious acting talent. It is the autobiographical yarn of Sister Luke, a very young Belgian nun, who enters the convent at age 17 for specifically the wicked reason: her doctor father refuses to let her marry the young man she loves because there is insanity in his family background. She won’t admit to him, as she is too young to admit it to herself, that her underlying reason in entering the convent was to spite her father, who believes women have a duty to marry and have children, but he is powerless to oppose her in this; he can prevent her from marrying her fiance, but who is he to defy God? Sister Luke, as played by Hepburn, wins us over instantly: she’s suited, open-hearted, all or nothing, trying and failing and trying again, expecting too mighty of herself, wanting to fit in to the routine of her cloister, but feeling stifled by its constraints. The atmosphere of the convent is brought so vividly to life that we feel the conflicts pulling her in opposite directions: the peace and serenity that are embodied in the Reverend Mother Emmanuel (Edith Evans is so tremendous in this role that she doesn’t seem to be acting at all), and the incessant weight of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical rules and regulations that attempt to crush all individuality and spontaneity. The pivotal conflict arises in the first half of the movie, when Sister Luke is asked by her Mother Worthy to fail a qualifying examination for a nursing post in the Congo so that a less gifted nun can have her state, and Sister Luke has to effect a choice: her failure will be a gift from God, but her success in the examination will gather her a station in the Congolese hospital where her talents can be most fully utilized. And this is where Sister Luke has to face her inner dilemma: the convent, with all its rules and regulations, hasn’t managed to crush her individuality — she is too great her hold person to let go of herself.

It is in the Congo that Sister Luke comes into her beget. She falls in worship with the country and its people as soon as she steps off the boat. She is sent to the European hospital to help Dr. Fortunati, a radiant, cynical surgeon who immediately sees through Sister Luke and understands her better than she understands herself. The meeting of minds between these two is awesome to peep and in itself makes the movie worth seeing. Dr. Fortunati, brilliantly played by Peter Finch, tells Sister Luke time and again that she will never be the kind of nun her convent expects her to be. The sexual tension between the two is evident but downplayed; Dr. Fortunati knows it’s impossible and Sister Luke simply refuses to retort it. The climax comes when Sister Luke is ordered relieve to the mother house in Belgium, and we suspect that Dr. Fortunati may have had a hand in it, to force her to face up to the fact that she is more nurse than nun.

The year is 1939 and World War II is about to commence. Sister Luke, chafing at the constraints of the mother house, is drawn into the war in ways her convent never imagined or would sanction. She assists a young lay nurse, who looks up to her as a role model, to work for the Resistance. She is elated when a German woman dies in the convent hospital. And she is finally forced to scrutinize inside herself and realize that while she may be able to derive chastity and poverty, obedience is impossible. At this point Sister Luke realizes she can no longer go on living a lie. The scenes in which her confessor and Reverend Mother Emmanuel attempt to dissuade her from leaving the convent are the most great in the film. “You joined the convent to be a nun, not a nurse”, remonstrates Reverend Mother. But this is precisely where she’s wrong; Sister Luke is considerable more a nurse than she will ever be a nun. After 17 years at war with herself, Sister Luke signs the papers severing her from her convent, and goes out into the world.

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Hepburn’s performance in a role which demands so grand from her is incredible; we not only feel but section all her conflict and inner wound. There is no map she could arrive across as a boring, mousy nun (Hepburn would be drop-dead glowing even in a burlap sack) but her acting is so convincing that we forget she is the handsome Audrey Hepburn and peep her only as a soul in torment. Peter Finch is helpful as Dr. Fortunati and all of the minor characters are very well portrayed, but the accurate soul of the movie is Edith Evans as Reverend Mother Emmanuel, concerned with the spiritual health of her flock, and despairing yet fatalistic as one of her flock inexorably slips away. The movie is long (two and a half hours) but it’s never boring; it grabs our interest from the opening frame and holds it to the final frame in which Hepburn turns a corner out of the convent grounds and out of our seek. The one jarring heed, especially after 40 years, is the patronizing paternalism of the Belgian colonization in the Congo; except for the education and medical care provided by the Church, the cruelty of Belgian colonial occupation was legendary and makes us wonder what Sister Luke’s fate would have been if she had returned to the Congo after she left the convent. At the demolish of the film we are left with titanic respect and admiration for an incredibly strong yet fallible young woman whose trek to self-knowledge is a life-long project.

Audrey Hepburn is best known for her light romantic comedies. Everybody loves them. She dresses up in some Givenchy outfits and blows the audience away with her beauty and charm. In “The Nun’s Memoir” she completly sheds that image and immerses herself in the role of the conflicted Sister Luke, a Belgian nun torn by her obligations to her church and order, her duty to her patients as a nurse, and her duty to her country during the Nazi occupation.

This a long and very introspective film that is not for everyone. It contains a detailed gaze at life in a Belgian convent and a Congo hospital in the years before WWII which may bore some people. Also some of Audrey’s fans looking for her as Princess Anne or Sabrina Fairchild or Holly Golightly may be disappointed to gain only the positive, reserved, and prideful Sister Luke. (Although Audrey does originate gorgeous looking nun.) The length, the slowly paced style, the subject matter, and the new role for its star have combined to preserve it off the list of Audrey Hepburn’s best known films.

Personally, I believe this Audrey’s greatest dramatic performance and maybe her best performance ever. She very ably conveys Sister Luke’s inner conflict between her oath as a nun and her duties as a nurse, daughter, and Belgian citizen. That she is able to do so in a film that has long stretches where there is no dialogue is considerable. She was nominated for Best Actress for this role, and she more than deserved to get, but came up short. “The Nun’s Myth” illustrates that Audrey Hepburn certainly had the ability to flesh out dramatic characters and that she was more than fair a charming and blooming woman in a Givenchy outfit. She was a large actor as well.
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