The Prison as Cathedral: John Greyson’s “Lilies” (1996) and the Liturgy of Revenge

John Greyson’s Lilies unfolds like a sacramental hallucination; an incantation of guilt, memory, and forbidden grace staged as theater, but lived as cinema. Adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard’s 1987 play Les Feluettes, the film doesn’t merely interpret its source. It explodes it into a tapestry of aching gestures, sacred images, and erotic wounds. It moves with the rhythm of a liturgy remembered after death. If the play was a confrontation, the film is a resurrection.

The story is contained within a prison in 1952, where Bishop Jean Bilodeau arrives to hear a final confession from Simon Doucet, a man imprisoned for decades. The prison chapel becomes a stage. Inmates become actors. A play unfolds that reenacts the events of Simon’s adolescence, including his love for Vallier, the son of a local countess, and the jealous betrayal of their schoolmate Bilodeau. There are no women, only male inmates performing female roles, not with mockery but with a kind of rapt devotion. The narrative slips fluidly between past and present, memory and spectacle, identity and performance. It is theater not as entertainment but as revenge, as ceremony, as final judgment.

The prison setting is crucial, not simply as a plot device but as a philosophical space. It places Lilies in direct conversation with the Marquis de Sade, whose own theatrical experiments within prison walls reimagined theater as an instrument of subversion and exposure. De Sade’s theater, written under the eye of confinement, was not an escape from punishment but a magnification of it. Power was its subject and also its condition. In Bouchard’s play, the prison is a crucible for memory. In Greyson’s film, it becomes something stranger, something sacred and obscene in equal measure. The prisoners’ performance is not rehabilitation. It is exorcism. And Bilodeau is the one on trial.

The influence of de Sade reverberates not only in setting but in structure. The play’s conceit of men forced to perform roles they once repressed, under the direction of the man they ruined, mirrors the Sadean inversion of master and servant, priest and penitent, spectator and victim. Greyson does not emulate de Sade’s cruelty, but he absorbs the logic of theatrical punishment and then redirects it toward revelation. There is no sadism in Lilies, but there is ritualized suffering. Every gesture is both accusation and sacrament. Every image seems to ache.

The first of several devastating scenes begins with the young Vallier, nude, bound, and adorned as Saint Sebastian in an amateur theatrical pageant. Played by an inmate in drag, yet filmed with sensual tenderness, Vallier becomes less a character than a vision. Arrows pierce his torso. Light bathes his skin. The boys in the audience look on with awe, with longing, with fear. What begins as pageantry collapses into erotic trance. Bilodeau, adolescent and already terrified of his desires, watches with a fury that is indistinguishable from ecstasy. In Vallier’s suffering, the Church’s iconography is revealed as the source and image of homoerotic fascination. It is the moment that sets all tragedy in motion.

In another key sequence, Vallier and Simon find themselves alone by a lake. They undress, enter the water, and for a moment time seems to collapse. They are no longer watched. The camera becomes hushed. Their bodies move slowly, without choreography. They kiss not like boys discovering desire but like men who already understand its cost. Greyson does not sensationalize the moment. He films it as a sacrament. The water holds them like a chalice. Yet even here the memory is not innocent. It is being performed by inmates decades later, for an audience that includes the man who destroyed them. Desire is not separable from its betrayal.

A third scene takes place in the prison chapel, now transformed into a surreal makeshift theater, where Simon confronts Bilodeau through the final act of the play. The confrontation is not verbal. It is theatrical. Bilodeau is made to watch his younger self humiliate Vallier, plant evidence, and orchestrate Simon’s arrest. The actors around him move with studied slowness, their voices solemn and incantatory. Candles burn along the altar. A painted scrim flutters in the wind. Bilodeau pleads for forgiveness, but the structure of the play allows none. Greyson films this moment with almost frightening serenity. The prison has become a cathedral of memory, and Bilodeau is its last, most broken relic.

The film’s religious symbolism is not ornamental. It is its language. Quebec’s Catholicism, unlike the secular, modernist Parisian strain, was until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s an omnipresent institution governing education, morality, public health, and private conscience. Its power was not abstract. It was embodied in every family and every secret. Lilies does not critique this power directly. It infiltrates it. Greyson turns the Church’s imagery into a vocabulary of queer pain and beauty. The chapel is both theater and temple. The male bodies are both profane and divine. The repression is not just societal but ecclesial. Bilodeau is not simply a villain. He is a bishop not by accident but by destiny. His calling was always guilt.

The film’s aesthetic style intensifies this religious framework. Greyson’s direction is careful, ceremonial, even devotional. He avoids handheld immediacy in favor of composed, painterly shots that linger with the weight of confession. Daniel Jobin’s cinematography builds this mood with light and shadow that evoke Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and Dreyer’s austere spirituality. The prison sequences feel enclosed, lit by candle or filtered daylight that seems to carry the memory of stained glass. The past is depicted with soft focus, muted tones, and frames that hover just slightly too long, as if memory itself were reluctant to fade. Nothing is rushed. The film moves with the deliberation of a procession toward an altar no one wishes to reach.

Mychael Danna’s score contributes to this sense of liturgical drift. The music is composed with choral motifs, string harmonies, and ambient minor-key textures that hover on the edge of lamentation. It does not impose emotion. It listens. In key scenes, Danna allows silence to dominate, and when the music returns, it carries the weight of something sacred and buried. It is a soundtrack composed for a funeral procession no one attended, prayers spoken in a language everyone has forgotten.

The film’s most significant shift from the original play lies in its use of English. Bouchard’s text is embedded in Quebec’s linguistic reality. It draws on the tension between colonial French heritage and Catholic suppression. The language of the play moves between baroque arias of aristocratic speech and sudden dives into working-class French-Canadian idiom. These tonal shifts are blunted in English. The social critique becomes hazier. Vallier’s mother, the Countess, loses some of her grandeur. Her monologues, which in French carry echoes of Racine and Robespierre, feel more theatrical than ideological in the film. The revolutionary subtext fades, or is displaced into abstraction.

What the film gains is sensual architecture. Greyson understands cinema as a container for memory, not as recollection but as re-performance. The play was a confrontation with history. The film is a sacrament of it. The screen becomes a surface onto which pain is painted again and again, until the surface begins to tear.

Lilies is not an argument for tolerance or visibility. It offers something more unsettling. It presents queer love as an article of faith. Not something to be proven, but something to be worshipped. It is not a narrative of liberation. It is a theology of desire. It is about men who loved and were punished, and who, decades later, build a theater inside a prison to punish their punisher. It is about memory not as recovery but as ritual.

There is no redemption for Bilodeau. There is only the play. And in the final moments, as the candles burn low and the actors remove their wigs and robes, what remains is not justice but something stranger and more complete. A kind of queer beatitude. A sanctity without absolution. A final image that does not ask to be resolved but remembered.

Lilies is not perfect. It loses something essential in translation. Its politics become submerged. Its dialogue, at times, becomes stylized to the point of artifice. But these are the costs of transformation. The film leaves behind the sharpness of the stage for the reverence of the screen. And what it finds is not clarity, but radiance. A masterpiece, almost. And all the more powerful for what it cannot say.