Three Kurt Kren shorts, 1969-1982

[This is part of a sporadic series in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. The three films reviewed here appear on the Kurt Kren collection Which Way To CA?.]


Underground Explosion is Kurt Kren's approximation of the feeling of being frazzled and high at a rock concert. Kren was recording a performance by Krautrock band Amon Düül II at a 1969 underground music festival, but the recording is anything but a straightforward documentation. Instead, the frenzied, fragmentary nature of the film captures the drug-fueled, hazy nature of the music itself, communicating the confused, confusing sensation of this music and these kinds of experimental 60s festivals. The images are shaky and rapidly collaged together so that the action is often unclear: lights, mobs of people, a stage full of musicians, men slow-dancing with one another, performers stripping down at the microphone, a guitar, someone singing. Only sporadically does the frantic flow of images slow down, and then as often as not it's only to photograph some near-empty corner of the auditorium, the camera not settling down on anything in particular. The jagged pace of the editing is what really counts, the shapes and colors that go flying by, rather than the actual content.

Similarly, the soundtrack seldom provides much of a clue as to what the band actually sounds like, their spiky, dissonant rock jams only occasionally coming through clearly. Most of the time, the sound is as unpredictable as the images, giving the impression not of listening to a rock band but of listening to their bassy, distorted pulses through thick walls in a room next door to where they're actually playing. The soundtrack is muted, distorted, sometimes seemingly even reversed and manipulated, the sound occasionally fading out almost entirely to a dull headache-like throb at the edges of awareness.

Like Andy Warhol's famous deconstructive portrait of the Velvet Underground, this film is unsatisfying as a concrete document of a performance, but very satisfying indeed as a blurry, subjective suggestion of the feeling of being there.


Auf der Pfaueninsel is a devilishly simple conceptual joke told with Kurt Kren's characteristic deadpan wit. The film is a minute and 21 seconds long, which consists of a solid minute of methodically displayed credits followed by a few short snippets of "home movies" showing members of the Vienna Aktionists and family members at leisure. The joke is one of expectation, as Kren's opening credits lists the names of Günter Brus and the other Aktionists who will appear in the film. One expects something like Kren's other Aktionist films, a frantic collage of horrifying excerpts from the group's scatological, provocative performances.

Instead, Kren shows the provocateurs offstage, outside of the theater, as family and friends. They're taking a walk, visiting the zoo, goofing around a bit. Brus sees a van with some writing on the side and uses his hands to cover up some of the letters so that it spells "Brus," the kind of goofy, self-conscious joke that anyone would do in a home movie made while hanging around with friends. The other shots in this quick flash of footage are even more mundane, showing the members of the performance art troupe standing around looking at zoo enclosures or just walking along; most of the people named in the credits are never even seen clearly, just appearing from behind as they stroll with their family and friends. It's a very simple gag but a very clever one as well, a way of interrogating the public/private divide. Just because this is a film introduced with a cast list, does that make it every bit as much a performance or a piece of art as the Aktionists' usual displays? Or is it merely a "home movie" like any other?


Getting Warm was the third and best of the three self-described "bad home movies" that Kurt Kren made on a 1981-82 trip to the United States (the other two films in this trilogy of three-minute shorts were Which Way To CA? and Breakfast im Grauen). Shot in New England and Austin, Texas, this is the only one of the three films to be in color, and the change in film stock makes a big difference, giving the film a sensual, evocative quality very different from the dull, quotidian, washed-out grays of the other two films. Kren has said that these films are purposefully more amateurish than real amateur movies, the joke of the "bad home movie" description being that even amateur home documentarians usually edit their tapes a little, whereas Kren leaves in everything he shot. All the banal moments are left in, creating a home movie that simply captures a string of disconnected, soundless, usually quite unassuming moments. At one point, Kren even leaves in a shot in a room where it's too dark to see anything, and the frame goes entirely black for a few moments, the darkness too a document of something that happened, something seen and experienced and captured for posterity on film.

At another point, Kren cuts from night to day and back to night again, with three consecutive shots of a Safeway sign, glowing an eerie neon blue in the darkness, one of the only points of light, but rendered ordinary and unremarkable again in the light of day, in the daytime shot sandwiched in between those two quick slices of neon-lit night. Similarly, a television set flickers and glows, sometimes a square of light surrounded by black, sometimes just a focal point for the bored gaze of a reclining man on the nearby bed. Kren cuts in different views, different times of day and different lightings, to show how ordinary objects can shift and change depending on context, sometimes acquiring a weird prosaic kind of beauty for a few brief moments before a cut.

Xala

Ousmane Sembene's Xala is a sharp, bitter satire of Senegalese independence, lampooning the corruption and incompetence of the sham self-government of Sembene's home country, comparing the new black leaders' shameful failings to sexual impotence. One of these new leaders is El Hadji (Thierno Leye), a wealthy and well-respected businessman who is about to marry his third wife. On his wedding night, however, he is unable to consummate his marriage to his beautiful young wife; he has been cursed with a "xala" that renders him impotent. This impotence in the bedroom mirrors the impotence of Hadji and the other corrupt black businessmen and politicians of the new supposedly independent government, because while triumphantly claiming to have taken Senegal away from white European colonialists, this new government is deeply in the pocket of the colonialists, who still wield their power in fact if not in title.

In the opening scenes, the French are kicked out of the Chamber of Commerce, their statues and other paraphernalia left outside on the steps of the chamber as a symbol of the change in government. But the change is not as dramatic as it initially seems: by the time the new black council has met for the first time, they've shed their African garb for Western tuxedos, and the former white rulers are still in the room, now handing out suitcases full of money to the new black ministers. The changes are purely cosmetic. The French art has been replaced with a photograph of the new black president, and black men now sit around the conference table, but they are puppets of the old white rulers, who now adopt a subservient pose while still controlling everything from behind the scenes. Sembene stages this all methodically: the changeover from the whites to the blacks is orderly, as is the smooth process by which the white bankers and politicians sneak back into the governing room. It's like a revolving door by which the whites are kicked out, without fanfare, and re-enter the chambers of power just as easily.

Sembene is relentlessly parodying this state of affairs, and the humiliation of Hadji is a kind of symbolic revenge against all the leaders of his type, who claim to represent the people but only work to enrich themselves. Throughout the film, more and more ugly revelations about Hadji slowly come out, as his life crumbles around him under the curse of the xala. He's involved in numerous corrupt, under-the-table deals, accepting cash to sell off reserves of badly needed food intended for poor regions afflicted with droughts. Hadji and his friends are remote from those struggles. While the mass of his country's people starves to death, Hadji buys TVs and cars for his third wife, using the money from European bribes and his own corrupt deals to pay for the luxuries of his wives.


Some of the film's most powerful scenes focus not on Hadji but on the vast lower classes of the country who he ignores in his own quest for personal enrichment. El Hadji's sexual plight is juxtaposed against the genuine suffering of the crippled beggars and poverty-stricken villagers who Hadji and his fellow ministers refer to as "human rubbish." The ministers supposedly represent the people, but it's obvious that they only represent themselves, that they're out of touch with the way real people live their lives in this poor, drought-plagued country. One man comes to the city hoping to buy food for his poor village with the scant money the villagers have scraped together, but his funds are stolen and he's left to live with the other beggars. Another man sells a political newspaper that he brags is the only Wolof-language journal in the country, a sign of how marginalized African culture has become in a country where the ruling classes, black or white, speak French. Hadji's politicized daughter Rama (Myriam Niang) refuses to speak French, infuriating her father by answering him in Wolof even though he speaks to her in French, and she also refuses to drink the bottled Evian water that's such a prominent status symbol for the black ministers and upper class.

The black ministers try to separate themselves from African culture, decrying the superstitions of tradition and religion in their efforts to assimilate with the Europeans. (Of course, virtually the only tradition the male ministers don't reject is the traditional ability to marry more than one woman.) Thus the "xala" that afflicts Hadji is an expression of the Africanness that he rejects, and his increasingly desperate efforts to overturn the curse bring him into contact with precisely the superstitions and traditional beliefs that his Eurocentric attitudes oppose. Sembene is symbolically forcing the black ruling class with their European pretensions to "lower" themselves back to the level of the rest of the people: one village witch doctor tells Hadji that he has to crawl towards his wife on hands and knees, a charm clenched between his teeth.

The film is at times savagely funny in its mockery of Hadji and his friends, and there's a great deal of anger in Sembene's outrage at the ways in which these business and governmental leaders have simply acted as puppets for a de facto French regime. In one scene, Sembene even gives Hadji himself a speech decrying the hypocrisy of his fellow ministers, who eventually turn their backs on Hadji, essentially for getting caught committing the same crimes that they've all committed. The ending, especially, is seething with rage, as Sembene makes Hadji an effigy for the entire corrupt ruling establishment. Xala balances this righteous anger with its humanist, realist depictions of the poor and the maimed, the people suffering from poverty and hunger while men like Hadji exploit the country and the people, only pretending to represent black revolution and black self-government.

Fascination

Fascination is a very apt title for a Jean Rollin film. Rollin's ethereal horror oeuvre revolves around the idea of fascination: fixation, obsession, fetishism, the irresistible allure of danger and death, great beauty tangled up with supernatural horror. His cinema repeatedly examines the fascination of the director and, often, his protagonists, with the strange, unsettling, eerie occurrences that haunt his movies. From film to film, Rollin wove together increasingly familiar images and themes that constitute the subject of his fascination: beautiful women naked or dressed only in diaphanous see-through gowns, gothic rural settings, vampirism, seduction, ruined castles lit by candles, secret societies that seem to flicker on the edges of the material world, trapped between states, their exact nature uncertain.

Fascination embodies so many of these fixations that it feels like an ultimate statement of the director's vision; perhaps not his best film but definitely one of his most characteristic, which is why it's also become, within this unusual auteur's cult, one of his most iconic works. The story is, in the usual Rollin fashion, extremely simple, a bare sketch of a scenario used to set up the dreamy, vaguely menacing atmosphere that is the film's true substance. The thief Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire) betrays the rest of his criminal gang and flees their revenge, arriving at a nearly empty rural estate where the only residents are a pair of girls, Eva (Brigitte Lehaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï). Marc holds the girls prisoner while fending off his gang's attacks, but it soon becomes clear that if this is a hostage situation, who's the hostage and who's the captor might be the reverse of what Marc thinks.


Certainly, Marc believes that he's the one in control here, but a driving theme of the film is the exploration of power's relationship to gender and sexuality. Marc is a sneering, arrogant jerk, dominating these two girls from his position of power, waving his phallic gun around as a symbol of his sexual and physical dominion over them. Eva and Elisabeth sometimes play their expected roles, cowering in fear before him, but soon their show of fear and submissiveness gives way to a much more playful, mocking attitude, skewering his belief in his dominance, suggesting that they're really the ones in control. While taunting him with the prospect of sex, they actually go to bed together, in a scene of sumptuous softcore eroticism that could've come directly out of one of Rollin's adult productions. When Eva does give in to Marc, she's quite open about her motives: she wants to keep him there until nightfall, using her sexuality to lure him into what increasingly seems like a deadly trap.

There's clearly something sinister going on here, even if the hapless, arrogant Marc laughs off all the premonitions and warnings about the fate awaiting him once midnight strikes. Elisabeth, who seems slightly less unhinged than her compatriot, warns Marc that he should flee, that something horrible is in store for him that night. Anyone who enters the orbit of these girls is trapped within "the universe of madness and death," she says, clutching the gun she's stolen from their guest. Later, the girls are joined by more members of what seems to be a blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping club of wealthy bourgeois women, but Marc still doesn't catch on. The audience is a few steps ahead of him anyway, having been warned more explicitly by the gorgeously morbid prologue in which these women daintily drank ox blood from goblets while standing in a slaughterhouse, their frilly dresses dragging in the bits of cartilage and bloody flesh strewn across the reddened floor. The leader of this club, Hélène (Fanny Magier), warns Marc, "Beware, death sometimes takes the form of seduction," but even then he treats this night like a game, so secure in his masculine superiority that it never occurs to him that he's not in control, that he's become the prey rather than the predator.


The film's most enticing predator is undoubtedly Eva, who is especially terrifying in a sequence where she methodically, ruthlessly kills the members of Marc's gang, stabbing one man in the side during sex and then prowling after the others with a black robe billowing around her naked body, a scythe held threateningly in front of her. She's a sexy, seductive grim reaper, blonde death with a vicious blade that easily outdoes Marc's puny gun as far as penetrative phallic imagery goes. Rollin had first featured Lahaie in one of his bills-paying adult film productions, then given her a small but unforgettably intense role in his moody zombie classic The Grapes of Death.

Here, she magnifies and extends the sexy insanity of her part in that film, killing with her mouth locked in a horrible/alluring rictus grin, baring her teeth and smiling as she slashes throats with her reaper's blade. There's something feral about her, an animalistic quality that somehow only makes her more appealing, and more unsettling. Rollin captures her in evocative closeups in the moments before the kill, her eyes above the blade, her lips below it. Rollin seems to be asking, which is more dangerous, the scythe or the girl who wields it? Her alluring lips, her piercing eyes, they're as deadly as a knife to the guts, and with her, one leads to the other — her beauty and sexuality are lures into death and oblivion.

The strange attractiveness of death and perversion are at the core of this film, which perfectly captures the fascination that these beautiful, deadly women hold for their victims. Rollin makes the girls and their surroundings ravishing: the mansion, lit by candelabra, is lavishly decked out with fancy furniture and paintings, the surfaces of which Rollin's camera frequently probes whenever it's not being distracted by the lovely anti-heroines. Sensual and chilling in equal measures, Fascination is a nearly comprehensive catalogue of Rollin's obsessions and themes, exploring the appeal of the macabre and the impotency of male power through this hypnotically languid horror tale.

The Grapes of Death

The Grapes of Death marked a return to form for the idiosyncratic horror auteur Jean Rollin. After 1974's remarkable but commercially unsuccessful Lips of Blood, Rollin, unable to get even the typically miniscule budgets his particular brand of surreal, dreamlike horror required, began churning out straight-up softcore porn under the aliases Michael Gentil and Robert Xavier. The Grapes of Death, produced in 1978, four years after his last horror project, was Rollin's retreat from the adult film ghetto. It's a fantastic return, too, with Rollin tackling the zombie genre and adapting his sensual, hypnotic aesthetic to this creepy tale of a rural wine-producing region overrun by shambling, rotting, diseased and insane farmers.

This decay of civilization is seen through the eyes of Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), a young woman who's planning to visit her fiancé at the winery he manages. Instead, her train journey is interrupted by a zombified man who kills her friend and chases her off the train into a typically desolate Rollinesque countryside. This rural landscape is alternately brightly sunny and shrouded in fog, utterly without logic or concern for continuity. The film has a strangely gorgeous, pastoral atmosphere that clashes against the periodic outbursts of sloppy gore and disgusting, smeary makeup effects. Fleeing from her zombie pursuer, Élisabeth runs across a foggy bridge, surrounded in fluffy white clouds, then runs into a large open meadow that Rollin films in a stunning wide shot, the sun a glowing blue pinprick just barely cutting through the thick soup of the fog. Élisabeth arrives at a cemetery, looming out of the fog with massive stone crosses atop its locked gate, but soon after, the fog disappears in between shots, and the heroine is running across a rocky, barren hillside, bathed in gorgeous summery sun.

Weather and landscape are both prone to this kind of slippage in Rollin's films, with their uneven regard for the niceties of continuity. The countryside itself provides many of the chills here, with this terrified young woman stumbling across this desolate, unwelcoming land, coming across crumbling stone buildings in various states of decay and destruction, as though the land was already abandoned and falling apart long before this zombie plague further decimated the region. Rollin has always loved the gothic ruin of collapsing castles and old buildings situated in bleakly beautiful, unpopulated surroundings. He makes these scenes both sinister and oddly appealing, because he's obvious fascinated by the poetic ruin of these landscapes even as he uses them as foreboding settings for tales of death and terror.


Rollin is adept at finding a languid, melancholy form of poetry in the trashy, violent, sexually charged B-movie material that drives the often fragmented narratives of his films. Here, he makes his zombies more sad than terrifying, as they stumble around, their faces melting with oozing open sores that pour multicolored liquids down their cheeks and over their foreheads. The effects are primitive and ugly, and also somewhat disgusting — especially in the disturbing scene where one zombie repeatedly smashes his head against a car's window, leaving pus-yellow streaks on the glass until he finally manages to shatter it. Rollin makes this zombie plague explicitly a kind of disease, caused by pesticides used on wine grapes, and the sufferers of the plague are in various states of mental and physical decay, some of them utterly blank, their minds erased, and others tragically seeming to understand that they're losing their minds and being possessed by violent urges.

There's a strange poignancy to these zombies. When the initial zombie is first chasing Élisabeth, he abruptly gets tired and slumps down to a seat on the railroad tracks, cradling his head in his hands, exhausted and frustrated; Rollin, interestingly, pauses to consider the emotions of the zombie, too tired to continue chasing his prey. Later, Rollin gives one of the zombies a surprisingly affecting (and creepy) death scene, using the last of his energy to bloodily kiss the severed head of the woman he'd loved and killed, whose head he'd been carrying around in front of him like a talisman ever since.


Élisabeth's journey across the countryside is structured around her encounters with various people affected in various ways by the plague. She leads the blind woman Lucie (Mirella Rancelot) through the wasteland of a ruined, burning village with dead bodies strewn everywhere, the blind woman unable to see the wreckage all around her — and later, unable to see the zombies, her former neighbors, gathering around her and slowly closing in. Towards the end of the film, Élisabeth falls in with a pair of farmers, unaffected by the disease because they drink beer instead of wine, who provide an opportunity for a sudden diversion into political commentary. The action suddenly halts for these two to briefly discuss politics, improbably connecting the zombie outbreak to the French Resistance and modern anti-militarism. It's such a clumsy and truncated bit of forced commentary that it almost feels like a parody of the kind of social issue messages that, following George Romero, have become de rigeur for zombie movies.

The film's most memorable cameo appearance comes from Brigitte Lahaie, an adult film actress who had appeared in one of Rollin's earlier porn ventures, and had apparently impressed the director: she'd go on to be an important muse in his next few features, and is here already a formidable screen presence. Her unnamed character (appropriately credited only as "la grande femme blonde") is a mysterious woman who Élisabeth encounters while fleeing from the zombies. Seemingly unaffected by the plague — in a typical Rollin flourish, she eagerly shows off her naked body to reveal the lack of rotting wounds — she nevertheless projects a curious, magnetic menace in her ferocious, teeth-baring smile. Her teeth permanently clenched, she looks like she's either holding back some intense inner turmoil or preparing to devour anyone in her path. She makes only a brief appearance here, but her unhinged, terrifying performance is unforgettable, especially since she also strikes some unexpected notes of poignancy within this portrayal of a deranged psychopath.

Moody, chilling, poetic and strangely moving, The Grapes of Wrath is another fantastic, utterly original horror piece from Rollin. It's slightly more straightforward and conventionally horrific than many of his earlier films, with more gore and action, but it's still primarily reliant on its dreamlike atmosphere, on the sense of an eerie journey across a haunted wasteland where the terror arises as much from the abstract aesthetics as from the actual supernatural or monstrous threat.

Lips of Blood

[This piece was previously posted as a guest review at Jeremy Richey's blog Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience, one of the Internet's very best resources on Rollin.]

Jean Rollin's best films use B-movie horror plots and low-budget production values as portholes into an eerie, unsettling dream world that ultimately has little to do with typical blood-and-gore horror movies. This is especially true of Lips of Blood, one of the director's finest works, and one of his most dreamlike and abstract. The film is a slow, sensuous study of the power of memory and the lure of childhood fantasies, a feverish dream of a film that chronicles a quest that's as much mental as physical.

Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) is at a party when he sees a photograph of a ruined castle that triggers a previously suppressed childhood memory or dream. He comes to believe that he's been to this castle as a boy, and that he's forgotten it for some reason; his childhood is a blur to him, and he's long felt disconnected from the stories that his mother (Natalie Perrey) has told him about his forgotten boyhood. The photograph instantly opens a path into his memories, stirring up images of a dreamlike night that he spent in the castle, watched over by a beautiful young girl (Annie Belle) dressed in white. He'd repressed the memories of the castle and the girl, but now that they've entered his mind again, he becomes obsessed, fixated on discovering the castle's whereabouts and trying to locate the girl.


Frederic is haunted by this dreamlike memory, and the film is all about the power that this fixation has over him. At the party at the beginning of the film, he compliments a girl on her perfume, prompting her to pointedly respond, "scents are like memories; the person evaporates but the memory remains." In Frederic's case, the memory too had evaporated for twenty years, but now it's wafted back up into his senses, and he begins seeing the mysterious girl from the castle everywhere. He goes to see a movie — the poster outside is for Rollin's The Nude Vampire, but the theater's actually showing The Shiver of the Vampires, suggesting how intimately connected all these gothic vampire fantasies are — and the girl appears in the theater, beckoning him to follow her. She leads him to a crypt, where Frederic unwittingly releases a quartet of creepy vampire girls (Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, Anita Berglund, and Hélène Maguin) who shadow him throughout the rest of the film, continually intervening to rescue him from the mysterious forces that seem intent on stopping him from locating the castle or the girl who dwelled within it.

The film moves at a typically lethargic, dreamlike pace, blending gothic horror imagery — bats and graveyards and vampire girls clad in gauzy robes — with a weird conspiracy thriller vibe. A photographer (Martine Grimaud) who tries to tell Frederic about the castle winds up dead, another woman poses, unconvincingly, as the girl from the castle, and a mysterious assassin tracks Frederic through the night, while the vampires stalk around the fringes of the plot, fading out of the shadows. Rollin's films have often been comparable to the surreal quest narratives of his contemporary Jacques Rivette, with worse acting and more nudity, and nowhere is that comparison more relevant than here. Rollin renders the city as a quiet, nearly unpopulated stage, pools of colored light highlighted in the darkness, shadows cast large and threatening on stone walls as Frederic wanders around the city, searching for answers and chasing phantoms through the streets.

The film feels like a loosely connected series of set pieces, with Frederic's frazzled state of mind creating the sense of disorientation and confusion that dominates his increasingly desperate journey. He begins to doubt his own sanity: the girl from his memory, or his dream, pops into being and blinks out of existence just as suddenly, leading him through the night, eventually guiding him directly to the answer he seeks, the location of the castle from the photo. Meanwhile, the vampires attack and kill random people, baring their uncomfortable-looking fangs and bloodying their mouths on the necks of their victims. At one point, the Castel sisters disguise themselves as nurses in order to rescue Frederic from the mental hospital where he's been locked up by his mother, who seems to know something about all these secrets and mysteries.


Indeed, Frederic's mother provides the obligatory burst of exposition that suddenly explains the story towards the end of the film, setting up the fantastic final act in which Frederic confronts the true nature of his reawakened memories. He's found what he's been searching for, and in the final ten minutes of the film Rollin adopts a tone of lunatic celebration, reveling in the embrace of the supernatural and the bloody. The supernatural is rarely to be feared in Rollin's work. The supernatural is, instead, erotic, alluring, haunting, beautiful, a fixation for Rollin just as the castle becomes for Frederic. There is thus an air of real melancholy in the final act's confrontations between vampires and vampire hunters; Rollin's sympathies are obviously not with the men with their stakes, menacing these girls, but with the vampires themselves, so young and lovely and sensual, retreating in fear before the men. The vampires are the real victims, not to be feared or hated but desired, respected, adored, just as Frederic desires the girl from his memory, who is, of course, also a vampiress, using her power to lure him back to her, to get him to set her free.

Rollin makes the embrace of the supernatural a cause for celebration here, particularly in the ecstatic coda, in which the long-imprisoned vampire relishes her newfound freedom, taking pleasure in the sensuality of nature. Together, Frederic and his vampire love run along the striking, apocalyptic, by now very familiar beach that so often symbolizes the pathway between worlds in Rollin's work. It's here that Frederic embraces his fate and is reborn, and in the finale — at once gloriously silly and wonderfully romantic — the lovers sail off together in a coffin, heading off into a new undead existence together.

The Man Who Loved Women

François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women is a retrospective look at the life and many affairs of an unrepetant womanizer, a man who can't resist chasing after one woman after another, never settling for any one woman for very long. But Truffaut's film, unfortunately, is nearly as shallow as its protagonist, Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), who flits around after all these women, waxing poetic about their charms, the beauty of their bodies, and making his pursuit of them seem like an art, an expression of his philosophy about the world. Bertrand pours that philosophy out into the pages of the book he's writing, and it's around that book that Truffaut structures the film, relating anecdotes from Bertrand's past through the stories he writes in his lightly fictionalized novel.

This is, despite its potentially lurid subject matter, a curiously flat and dry affair, simply relating one interchangeable affair after another, as Bertrand serially seduces women he meets at random and women who he goes through elaborate machinations to encounter. As a comedy, it's not especially humorous, and as a character portrait it skates along the surface except for a few moments when the script (by Truffaut, Michel Fermaud and Suzanne Schiffman) delves into Bertrand's psychology only to come up with some trite rationalizations for his behavior. It's hard to know what's more disappointing, the fact that the film spends most of its time observing this man's surface presentation of himself, or the fact that when it does dig deeper, it comes up with only clichéd mommy issues and a failed romance that seemingly set him upon his current path.

Truffaut spends much of the film on the surface of Bertrand's life, but these glimpses into his formative experiences suggest a very simplistic psychology at the core of the film. Bertrand is copying the behaviors of his mother (Marie-Jeanne Montfajon), who was a promiscuous lover who didn't want a child to change her life, so she simply ignored her son as much as she possibly could. So Bertrand's desire to "collect" women is both an imitation of his mother and a kneejerk response to her neglect, causing him to be desperate for women's affection and attention. Or else Bertrand was deeply wounded by Véra (Leslie Caron), who appears late in the film, when it had seemed like Bertrand was incapable of a truly substantial relationship with a woman, to describe a time when he did have what could have been a real, significant love if he hadn't screwed it up. Both of these possibilities are floated as possible psychological explanations for Bertrand's attitude towards women, which reduces this character to little more than a collection of well-worn clichés.


At one point, Truffaut seems to anticipate the potential criticisms of his film and tries to duck around them with a scene where Bertrand sends his manuscript to some publishers. At a meeting regarding the manuscript at one of these publishing houses, none of the readers like the book except for Geneviève (Brigitte Fossey), who defends Bertrand's book against the criticisms of the others. Most of the critics' complaints about the book could just as easily apply to Truffaut's film — that its protagonist is too self-aggrandizing, that the psychology of it is uninteresting — but Geneviève deftly overturns their objections, thus defending the film as well, making these seem like both a preemptive defense and a self-congratulatory assertion of the film's success. She claims that Bertrand's story is simply full of "the contradictions of life," that the writer is actually self-aware about his own womanizing, which he is to some extent, but the implication that Truffaut's film is so dramatically unsatisfying because it's about reality is hard to take. This isn't reality but a flat, overly literary bundle of character types and shallow characterization.

There are, nevertheless, some nice moments here, scenes and performances that hint at a potentially more satisfying movie that Truffaut could have made. Denner's performance as the titular womanizer is mostly fine, projecting some of the charm and elegance that make this otherwise unremarkable-looking man so irresistible to so many women. But it's the women who really shine, and it's to Truffaut's credit that he populates the film with so many lively, winning performances from women, so that Bertrand's conquests become as much a tribute to the loveliness and appeal of all these actresses as they are a more general poem to the lure of women. Especially compelling is Nathalie Baye as a woman who Bertrand goes to great lengths to meet, only to find out that she's not the woman he thought she was. Baye's appearance, towards the beginning of the film, provides a tantalizing glimpse of a path not taken for Bertrand. Once he finds out that she's not actually the woman he'd glimpsed on the street one day and tracked down so relentlessly, he leaves, but Baye's shy smiles and straightforward manner make her a compelling presence, lingering past Bertrand's loss of interest, implicitly condemning his shallow fixations.

Many of the film's other women are equally compelling — Nelly Borgeaud as an unhappy housewife who gets off on danger, Valérie Bonnier as a girlfriend who eventually decides she needs more from a relationship than the cool Bertrand can offer — but by necessity none of these characters stick around very long or are developed beyond a few scenes. Truffaut's film ultimately just provides a mirror for Bertrand's life: shallow, self-absorbed, displaying a stereotypical masculinity and flitting from one moment to the next without ever spending too long with any one person or thinking too hard about the meaning of it all.

Deep Red

Dario Argento's Deep Red is the predecessor of the director's unsettling Suspiria, sharing with that film a bright, colorful aesthetic, here with a particular emphasis on the red of the title. At times meandering and oddly paced — after a riveting opening, the film wanders aimlessly for quite a bit of its length — Deep Red is nevertheless dotted with enough striking, brilliantly composed images and chilling set pieces to make it compelling and often creepy.

Certainly, the film starts incredibly strong, doling out a few mysterious images — like a child's stockinged feet approaching a bloody knife on Christmas morning — during the credits, establishing the primal scene of violence that will drive the rest of the film. The film's best sequence is the extended opening featuring the psychic Helga (Macha Meril), who, during a demonstration of her powers, is suddenly assaulted by violent thoughts from someone in the audience. Argento stages this stunning sequence on a dramatic stage decorated with red-on-red: the dais at which the psychic sits is draped in a red cloth, and the curtains behind her are also red, so that she's surrounded by bright, bloody red as she writhes and cries out, overcome by the darkness and malevolence she unexpectedly finds drifting into her mind from somebody in the audience.

Argento's camera, taking on the point-of-view of this mysterious evil presence, shakes and jitters as the killer retreats from the theater. Throughout the film, Argento several times indicates the killer's perspective with this kind of handheld camera, most unsettlingly in the subsequent scene where Helga leaves the now-empty theater, still sensing the presence of those horrible thoughts, as the camera peeks out at her from behind a nearby pillar. The camera seems to be shaking with the killer's excited heavy breathing, with the thrill of the chase, establishing a voyeuristic perspective that aligns the camera, and the watching audience, with the hidden killer's vantage point. Soon, Helga is a victim, her gruesome murder witnessed by her neighbor Marc (David Hemmings), who begins investigating the killer while the body count, predictably, keeps getting higher and higher.


Argento's visual inventiveness is at its peak during the film's gory murder sequences, each of them a taut and unsettling set piece that's perfectly designed. In one scene, the killer's presence in a dark closet is indicated by a single eye suddenly opening in the darkness, at which point Argento's camera zooms in to capture that one eye staring out of the surrounding blackness. In another scene, for some reason the killer's appearance is preceded by an utterly creepy doll that jauntily jogs towards the terrified victim, cackling and waving its motorized arms in front of it. The doll's appearance is made even more unsettling by the casual way that Argento frames it, initially in a long shot in which the doll's unnatural movement is very disturbing, before cutting in for the obligatory closeup of its grinning plastic face.

These eerie scenes are spaced out through the film, providing periodic bursts of insane imagery and bright red blood that looks like paint. Much of the film is dedicated to Marc's slow, hesitant investigation, assisted by the reporter Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), and there's something of a disconnect between the baroque scenes of violence and the surrounding ordinariness of the rest of the movie. The film sometimes feels a little slack whenever the killer's not around, though the oddball humor and quirky fringe characters help to liven things up whenever the tension dissipates. There's a subtext of sexual insecurity in Marc, who's beaten at arm-wrestling by Gianna, and feels cramped and claustrophobic in her car, sitting significantly lower than her in the broken passenger seat, making him look very foolish next to her. Later, he visits his friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) and discovers that Carlo is gay, staying with a feminine man who might pass for a woman if not for his peach-fuzz mustache.

Much of the film's comic relief, especially the bizarre scenes featuring Carlo's mother (Clara Calamai), winds up tying into the film's twisty ending, but before this, the comic tone and alternation of suspense with the meandering investigative scenes gives the film a strange, disjointed feeling. The jangly, chiming prog rock soundtrack by Goblin (who'd go on to top themselves with their even better score for Suspiria) adds to the film's strangeness, the music resonating with the childlike melody that serves as the killer's trademark and connects these crimes to some sort of traumatic childhood incident. Deep Red is ultimately a very strange movie, its rambling pace spiked with scenes of violence that are made almost beautiful through the filter of Argento's aesthetic.

Demoniacs

Jean Rollin walks a very fine line in his trashy B-movie exploitation flicks. So much is "bad" and amateurish in his movies, from the wooden acting to the flimsy props to the ridiculous scripts, that it's sometimes difficult to determine just why the resulting films aren't bad, but in fact create a kind of budget poetry and eerie beauty from these minimal building blocks. Demoniacs perhaps proves just how easy it is for a Rollin film to tip over from that atmospheric minimalism into more typical sub-B-movie horror tripe. Demoniacs feels very much like a Rollin film in most ways; he's taking a brief detour from his obsession with lesbian vampires, but otherwise the film provides plenty of eerie beaches, ruined castles, sinister clowns, and languid softcore sex scenes. The usual shoddy production values and amateur acting are very much in place here. All the elements are there, but for whatever reason the ineffable magic that allowed Rollin's earlier films to transcend their trashy premises is missing here.

The story concerns a band of pirates who wreck ships by guiding them into the rocks with false light signals. After one of these shipwrecks, while the pirates are gathering their loot, two sisters (Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier) stumble to shore, the sole survivors of the wreck. The pirates attack and rape the girls — in a sequence staged so incompetently that it's laughable and discomfiting rather than harrowing — and leave them for dead on the shore. The girls aren't dead, though, and they eventually make their way to a ruined castle where the devil (Miletic Zivomir) is trapped along with two strange retainers, a clown (Mireille Dargent, donning clown makeup again after Requiem for a Vampire) and a bearded man who looks like Rasputin (Ben Zimet). The devil gives the girls his power through a sexual ritual, sending them off to get their revenge against the pirates.


It's a compelling enough story in its broad strokes, but Rollin, typically, isn't that interested in telling it. Instead, there are endless scenes of the pirates loitering around a bar where a psychic barmaid (Louise Dhour) stares into space and issues dire pronouncements about spirits, demons and violence. The pirate captain (John Rico) is occasionally plagued by a guilty conscience, which provides opportunities for some striking visions, as he sees the two girls from the shipwreck, dripping with blood, posing with skeletons and a creepy black stone angel with glowing red jewels for eyes. Mostly, though, the film feels slack and empty; it's just over an hour and a half long but feels much longer, its slowness not hypnotic as in Rollin's best films but draggy and numbing.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly the presence of Joëlle Coeur's vicious nymphomaniac pirate Tina. Coeur isn't really any better an actress than the average Rollin star, but she does project a savage form of sexual menace that makes her an especially magnetic, memorable screen presence. Tina's a deadly femme fatale who's turned on by evil: in the opening scenes, she watches with a wicked smirk as her fellow pirates attack and rape the two survivors of the shipwreck, and all the violence moves her to strip down and seduce the pirate captain into her arms. Rollin treats her to multiple closeups in which she smiles that sinister, lusty smile, sensually shaking her long hair away from her face, throwing her head back, overcome with arousal at the prospect of violence and pillaging. Her performance is totally unmodulated, violently sexy, awkward and erotic in equal measures, and she brings a level of energy and enthusiasm to the film that's otherwise totally missing. Her constant posing — putting her hands on her hips and thrusting to and fro in a sexually charged celebration of death and destruction — is blatantly theatrical, making her a caricature of erotic evil, a nasty cartoon character come to fleshy life.

If only Rollin had built a worthier movie around this devilishly unrepressed villainess. The credits sequence introduces this as "un film expressioniste de Jean Rollin," but that description is far more apt for the director's earlier movies, which truly did create expressionist beauty from low-grade horror schlock. This film just meanders aimlessly without ever taking advantage of its most promising elements; even the revenge quest of the two girls is disappointing. With all the power of the devil at their fingertips, the best the sisters can do for vengeance is to make some statues fall from pillars while Tina runs around screaming, in what must be the silliest and least convincing sequence in a movie with some very stiff competition for that title. A few compelling moments aside, Demoniacs is one of Rollin's weaker efforts, where the unique alchemy of his approach fails to come together, leaving only the multiple failings of performance and plotting that are usually glossed over by the director's idiosyncratic aesthetic.

Small Change

With Small Change, François Truffaut returns again to the topic of childhood, one of the recurring thematic focuses of his films ever since his famous debut feature The 400 Blows. It's a loose, anecdotal film, charming and sweet if perhaps also a little lightweight. There's little structure here, simply a series of vignettes involving various children living in a small town, as well as their teachers, particularly Richet (Jean-François Stévenin), whose wife is expecting a child of their own.

The film meanders along at an easy pace, bouncing lightly from one gently comic anecdote to another. One continuing subtext throughout the film is Truffaut's focus on the dawning of sexuality, the first stirrings of feelings about the opposite sex. The boys are always spying on girls, catching glimpses of one woman's skirt riding up as she bends over or another girl bathing herself, naked, in her window. These flashes of nudity and sensuality have the illicit erotic charge of something not fully understood but powerfully felt regardless. Similarly, Truffaut captures the infatuation of one boy, Patrick (Georges Desmouceaux), with his friend's mother (Tania Torrens), gazing rapturously at her and associating her with a poster he sees of a man and a woman on vacation in a train car, locked in a pose that, for the young boy, seems replete with sexual promise: Truffaut cuts rapidly back and forth between closeups of the man and the woman in the poster, as though visualizing the way that the boy tries to make sense of the obvious attraction between the poster's couple.

Truffaut also drops a few subtle movie references into the film, in particular to Hitchcock's Rear Window. Patrick's father is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, and at one point he looks out his window and sees a man in the opposite flat stringing film through reels for a projector. But the Rear Window references are most potently realized in a clever sequence where Sylvie (Sylvie Grezel) is left at home by her parents because she's being stubborn, so she appeals to her neighbors in the adjoining buildings by using a bullhorn to announce that she's hungry. Truffaut's camera pans around the courtyard, where all the residents gather at the windows, and finally conspire to use a basket and a pulley system — like the basket used to raise and lower a dog in Hitchcock's film — to deliver some food to Sylvie for her lunch.


One curious scene is the one where the toddler Grégory plays with his cat by a window and hangs off the ledge when the cat falls to a lower balcony. Truffaut builds the obvious tension of this scene, in which the boy's mother has gone out and he's been left home alone, getting into a dangerous situation, edging into ever more precarious positions as he clambers clumsily along the balcony, hanging off the small rail that's the only protection between him and a fall of several stories. Down below, people start noticing and can only watch helplessly as the boy hangs off the rail and finally falls to the ground. At this point, Truffaut abruptly breaks the suspense by having the kid land on his butt and simply giggle, unfazed and unharmed by the fall, which in reality would certainly have injured him severely at the least. It's a totally puzzling scene, followed up by a conversation between Richet and his wife in which they conclude that kids are tougher than one thinks, which must be the trite moral that Truffaut wants to communicate here. But it comes off as a bizarre piece of fantasy, a surreal fracture in a film that is otherwise committed to low-key realism, really offputting in its casual dismissal of the danger of this scenario.

It's especially jarring because, while the film generally has a pretty light and rosy outlook on childhood, Truffaut doesn't flinch away from the story of Julien (Philippe Goldmann), a poor kid whose family is abusing and beating the boy, a discovery that only comes out during a school physical. This plotline is treated with real honesty and directness, and it provides the opportunity for a speech from Richet that sums up the movie's treatment of childhood: "life is hard, but it's wonderful."

For the most part, Truffaut leans more towards the "wonderful" here, and the film is charming and pleasant from beginning to end, with nicely naturalistic performances from all the amateur child actors. It's a low-key film, with only sporadic traces of the more emotionally intense approach to childhood that Truffaut had explored in The 400 Blows. For the most part, he gracefully and tastefully covers sexual awakening, friendship and teasing, petty stealing and pranks, with a light touch and a warm, affectionate sensibility. A sweet, unassuming film, Small Change is a slight trifle that's nevertheless often moving and quietly funny.

The Story of Adèle H.

François Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H. is a study of romantic obsession and madness, an intensely focused character study about the disintegration of a young woman's mind in the wake of a failed romance. Based on the diary of Adèle Hugo (Isabelle Adjani), the daughter of French writer Victor Hugo, the film concerns Adèle's desperate and unrequited love for the British lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson). Adèle follows Pinson to Halifax in Canada, where he deploys with the army during the American Civil War. She begins stalking and pursuing the chilly, disinterested lieutenant, who's earned a reputation as a womanizer and a spendthrift, amassing gambling debts and bedding many women while Adèle pines hopelessly for him.

Truffaut relates the story of Adèle's descent into madness with a simple, direct style, chronicling without ornament or sentiment the increasing desperation and sorrow of this young girl who suffers for her love, chasing a man who clearly has no interest in her anymore, who has already gotten all he ever wanted from her. The film's style is bleak and dry, and Néstor Almendros' images are restrained to a flat color palette of grays and browns, capturing the increasingly constricted and miserable world that Adèle, so focused on her love, barely even notices around her. The film is overly literary, tied, like many of Truffaut's films, to its script, and to the excerpts from Adèle's letters and journals, which she often reads in voiceover. The film often feels bogged down by words, by letters passing back and forth, and if not for the remarkable performance that Truffaut gets from his lead actress, there would be little to hold onto here.

The film is driven by Adjani's exceptional performance as the miserable Adèle. Adjani possesses a fragile, crystalline beauty that, as the film progresses, becomes increasingly pale and wispy, her skin the shade of paper, her eyes strained by her constant tears. She carries the film's full emotional weight, perfectly capturing the intense suffering of this lovesick woman. Adèle's misery could seem simply pathetic if Adjani's performance were not so raw and sensitive, so totally committed to conveying this young woman's passion and her pain. As she becomes more and more unhinged, she begins to look like a ghost, dressed in rags, unable any longer to disguise her madness behind the appearances of a respected young lady.

Adjani is a powerful central presence, gradually revealing more and more of her tormented inner life as the script slowly peels back the layers of her insanity. There are indications that Adèle's mind isn't especially stable even before her fruitless pursuit of Pinson definitively shatters her mental well-being. When someone tells Adèle that she must have been unhappy when her older sister died, she replies, "everyone in the family adored her," a non-answer that suggests her ambivalent feelings about the sister who looked so much like her but seemingly had her life much more in order than the obsessive, lonely Adèle. Adèle is haunted by dreams in which she's drowning, as though she identifies with her sister, who died so dramatically with her loving husband, unable to save her, drowning along with her. It seems as though Adèle almost envies this romantic tragedy, haunted by the knowledge that her dead sister not only was favored by the family, but possessed the true, intense, passionate love that Adèle herself so desperately desires.


Adèle's infatuation with Lieutenant Pinson causes her to profoundly disconnect from reality, concocting such an elaborate series of lies and distortions that it's soon not clear what she actually believes. While she fruitlessly pursues the lieutenant, she sends dispatches back to her concerned family in which she makes it seems as though she and Pinson are in love and preparing to be married. Adèle is so immersed in her love that she's detached from reality, at once knowing that Pinson will never marry her and yet clinging to an impossible, unrealistic hope that he will change his mind. Her love drives her to some rather pathetic behavior: she tells Pinson that if he marries her, she will allow him to continue seeing other women, and at one point she even hires a prostitute and sends her to Pinson for the night, though Truffaut discreetly cuts to black before revealing if Pinson accepted this outrageous gift or not. Adèle even considers hiring a hypnotist to hypnotize Pinson into marrying her, though she abandons this possibility when the hypnotist is revealed as a fraud.

Truffaut occasionally shifts the film's focus off of Adèle to clumsily discourse on her father. At one point, a doctor discovers Adèle's identity and explains, mostly to the audience, just who Victor Hugo is and why he's so important, delivering an exposition-laden speech about the great man's literary talent and political beliefs, as well as a condensed version of his biography. It's obvious that Truffaut wanted to present this miniature essay on Hugo, to express his admiration for the author who had been exiled for his convictions, but this material has been shoehorned in here, its tone forced and unconvincing. The same goes for the voiceover at the end of the film, in which a narrator abruptly steps in to describe what happens to Adèle after the film ends, as well as to discuss the death of Victor Hugo and the mourning for the great man across all of France. Most of the film is so resolutely focused on internality and emotion that these diversions into historical context, these odes to Hugo, feel very out of place.

The film as a whole is often interesting, thanks mainly to Adjani's strong performance, but it's also a curiously flat affair, anchored by that searing central performance and not much else. It's never clear why Truffaut thinks this story is so important, though the great import placed on Adèle's parentage raises the disturbing possibility that Truffaut is telling the story mainly because of his admiration for Victor Hugo, rather than because he finds Adèle herself so compelling. It's a study of emotional breakdown, but though Adjani commits completely to this role and powerfully conveys her character's fragmentation, it never feels like the film as a whole is as committed to these intense emotions as the actress is. Truffaut retains his distance, resting the film so completely on the actress that in the end, it's only her performance that makes an impact rather than the character or the story, let alone any ideas or themes that might arise from this tale.

Day For Night

François Truffaut's Day For Night is a love letter to the movies, a celebration of everything that happens on a film set, from the moment the director says "action" to the moment he says "cut" and everything that goes on around those boundaries, the personal dramas and business negotiations and constant attention to tiny details that all gets woven into the finished product of a movie. Truffaut himself plays a director making a movie, a melodramatic tragedy called Meet Pamela, and Day for Night is structured entirely around the production of the film within the film, with sporadic detours into the romantic dramas of the cast and crew, as well as the day-to-day logistical problems associated with making a movie.

The film is a love letter not just to the movies, but to a specific form of movies, the studio-bound big production. Truffaut at times seems to think he's making an elegy for a dead form of movie-making; his character, the director Ferrand, says in voiceover that this kind of movie is outdated, that from now on movies will be shot in the streets rather than on studio sets. Truffaut is offering a nostalgic look back at the movies made before the French New Wave came along, seemingly with the assumption that Truffaut and his compatriots had rendered these big productions and artificial sets obsolete. It's an elegy that, forty years later, seems more than a little premature, as Truffaut himself — who, whatever the merits of his work, hardly ever followed up on the radical promise of his shot-on-the-streets debut — should have understood very well.

Despite this misplaced nostalgia, the film is charming because it's so packed with the director's obvious love of the movies, his affection for actors, stuntmen, script-girls, props crew and makeup artists, even producers. There are countless little affectionate nods to the love of movies. The crew passes "Rue Jean Vigo" on the way to a shoot, there are references to everything from The Rules of the Game to The Godfather, and at one point Ferrand spills out a package full of books, all of them tributes to directors, including Buñuel, Hawks, Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, even a book about Truffaut's fellow New Wave legend Godard, who had taken such a different path through the cinema, and with whom Truffaut had had a rocky relationship for years. (Godard, unsurprisingly, hated the film with its celebration of a studio-bound, craftsmanlike approach to the cinema, and the fallout from their angry letters about this film severed their friendship for good.)


Ferrand is also haunted by a dream of a boy stealing posters for Citizen Kane from a movie theater, a sign of how early in life the love of cinema manifests for these characters, and a nod to the director's continuing fascination with childhood. It's touching, even though Ferrand himself, haunted by dreams of cinematic greatness, hardly seems to be making an ambitious artistic masterpiece like Kane. Maybe Truffaut, whose own career was spotted with uneven, traditionalist love stories of the kind that Ferrand is making here, is suggesting that the charm and the pleasure of movies can be found in even some less satisfying and ambitious examples of the form. Just as Jean-Pierre Léaud's character, the actor Alphonse, is happy to go to the movies to see anything, Ferrand seems happy to be making a movie, any movie, and whether it's good or bad he'll be happy to have made it, to have created something from all this chaos and unpredictability.

Where Truffaut really excels, as always, is in honing in on little moments of searing emotionality amidst the chaos. On this set, everyone is sleeping with everyone, and while much of this plays out as typical bed-hopping farce, there's also genuine pathos in the on-set romances, particularly surrounding the production's lead actress Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Léaud's Alphonse. Alphonse spends much of the movie angrily pining for his girlfriend Liliane (Dani), who promises she's his but takes every opportunity to sneak off into a corner with other crew members, and finally leaves the set entirely with a departing British stuntman. Julie, trying to calm Alphonse down and prevent him from storming off the production, winds up going to bed with him, a mistake she instantly regrets when the needy, emotionally immature Alphonse (a very similar character to Léaud's Antoine Doinel) decides that he loves her and calls her husband to tell him so.

After the fallout from this has played out, the subsequent scenes of Julie and Alphonse together are infused with a somber gravity, the unscripted emotions of their private lives seeping into the script, sometimes intentionally as when Ferrand writes some of Julie's private words into the script for her character to say. One scene in particular, in which Julie walks with a candle casting a warm glow onto her features, staring straight ahead at the camera while Alphonse caresses her face, seems loaded with the emotions from the actors' offscreen affair, reverberating with the equally troubled onscreen relationship of their characters, who are supposed to be married.


There is also a great deal of emotional subtext surrounding two actors who are meant to represent the dying studio system, the old way of doing things. Severine (Valentina Cortese) was a once-great actress who now seems to be falling apart, constantly drunk on set and barely able to remember her lines or her cues. (Hilariously, she says she's used to working with Fellini in Italy, where dialogue is generally dubbed, so all she had to do was recite numbers while performing.) Scenes with her are repeatedly reshot, often becoming more and more disastrous with each take as she becomes drunker and more inconsolable over her failures. At one point, she laments that she's growing older, that her contemporary and costar Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is still getting roles as dapper lovers, while she gets cast in thankless parts as the jilted wife. There's a feminist subtext here about the differential treatment of men and women in the movies, but Truffaut, typically, briefly hints at the idea rather than really developing it; he's interested in stories, not ideas, which is always what separated him most decisively from Godard.

Alexandre himself is the other old-guard actor who embodies the film's nostalgia for old ways of doing things. Throughout the film, he's continually relating charming anecdotes about old Hollywood, about the quirks of the star system and the gossipy behind-the-scenes chatter that flows through the movie industry. At one point, as he relates one of these anecdotes, Truffaut's camera drifts in, probing towards a closeup as this actor waxes nostalgic about the glamour and magic of movies and Hollywood stars. Soon after, Alexandre, this symbol of the old era, is dead, in an offscreen car crash that might be a nod to Godard's own tribute to moviemaking, Contempt. Indeed, Contempt is an interesting comparison point in general. Godard's film is seemingly more personal in its focus on the emotional torment and romantic drama that gets woven into the production of a movie — Truffaut's bed-hopping dramas are low-key and tangential compared to the searing power of Contempt's apartment argument centerpiece — but Truffaut's film is personal in a different way. It's personal in the way it communicates a deep love of the movies that goes beyond the particular quality, or lack thereof, of a particular movie, to extend to the whole process of making movies, good or bad, ambitious or straightforward, commercial or arty.

Indeed, this is a film about, and probably for, people who love the movies, and live the movies as well. Alphonse wonders if the movies or life are more important, but for Truffaut — as for Léaud, and in his very different way for Godard too — the movies and life are intimately interconnected. And the movies, which transmute life into art, perhaps have the advantage. In one of the film's best and truest lines, the script-girl Joelle (Nathalie Baye), upon learning that Liliane has run off with a stuntman, says earnestly, "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy." One suspects that Truffaut, for all the romanticism of his movies, feels similarly.

Requiem for a Vampire

Jean Rollin's fourth film, Requiem for a Vampire, was the director's most abstract and bizarre vision yet. Rollin's surreal, alternately eerie and ridiculous vampire movies had always worked according to their own distinctive anti-logic, but here, more than ever, he'd seemingly reached a new level of confidence that allowed him to eliminate narrative altogether, focusing exclusively on the languid establishment of a mood through his vibrant imagery. There's hardly even any dialogue at all, and long stretches of time go by with not a word being spoken. The result is a pure expression of the director's obsessions, a dreamlike series of disconnected scenes in which the film's two beautiful heroines wander aimlessly into (and then out of) a gothic vampire tale.

Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mireille Dargent) are introduced in a nonsensical opening sequence in which they're dressed as clowns, fleeing from mysterious pursuers, engaged in a gun battle in which their male companion is killed. They burn the car, shed their clown makeup and baggy clothes for tiny skirts, pigtails and knee-high socks, and head off through the barren countryside. This prologue is never explained, but it sets the tone of casual absurdity that will drive the film. The film moves at a relaxed pace, the camera slowly tracking around from a distance as the two girls wander through high grass, coming across an overgrown cemetery where they curl up together under a gravestone, and eventually arriving at a stone castle that's populated with vampires.


Rollin's heroines are inquisitive and bold, and they prowl through the castle like a pair of sapphic Nancy Drews, peeking around corners with their eyes wide, investigating these ruins, pausing only briefly to roll around naked together in bed. They come across a strange tableau in which skeletons in robes have been arranged around an altar, with a vampiress (Dominique Toussaint) sitting nearby, playing the organ and leering at the girls with comically large fangs sticking out over her lips. Even when the girls begin fleeing from the vampires and their savage, caveman-like servants, the pace remains narcotized and unsettlingly slow: a chase sequence plays out clumsily in a long shot in which the girls seem to be traipsing casually through a field of flowers while the vampires slowly advance in the distance. Rollin leaves large gaping ellipses that create a subtle sense of disorientation: after one caesura, the girls appear staring numbly ahead, vampire bats affixed to their necks, and then after another cut the bats are simply gone and the girls are left with twin red marks on their necks.

Rather than telling a story, Rollin seems to be working out his symbolism and fetishism of the vampire mythology at a purely primal, sensual level. The leader of the vampires keeps women chained in the basement of the castle, where they're raped and bitten by the vampires and their servants in an over-long and very gratuitous sequence, bathed in red colored lights as the women writhe around on their chains, culminating with a vampire turning into a bat to nestle in the pubic hair of one of the women. Rollin revels in this kind of outlandish imagery, celebrating the gothic sensuality of the vampire legend. During the arcane rituals at the film's climax, a vampire plays the piano in a graveyard while the two girls are led off one by one to be "initiated" by the male vampire, who can only transform virgins into his kind.


The film is a riff on sexuality and virginity, presenting a warped vision of the sexuality often associated with vampires. The two heroines, set to be inducted into vampirism, react in very different ways: while Michelle gives into her new vampiric thirsts, luring a man to the castle by stripping for him before she feeds on him, Marie finds a man as well but just has sex with him and then hides him away, telling the vampires that she couldn't find a victim. Rollin is reversing the usual hypocritical puritanism of so many horror movies, in which women who have sex are inevitably consumed by the movie's evil in the end. Here, it's the virgin who's corrupted, who gives into vampirism, while Marie, because she's no longer a virgin, retains her humanity and refuses to drink blood. Rollin isn't really interested in the love story, though, and at the film's climax, Marie's lover abruptly (and rather comically) gets sick of all this supernatural weirdness and runs off, leaving the two girls to escape together, reunited after the split caused by their different attitudes about vampires and sex.

That's a typical happy ending for Rollin, the girls wandering off into another adventure, leaving behind the rather melancholy and self-destructive vampires in their decrepit graveyard. Throughout the film, the girls flirt with the supernatural, with death and decay, and experiment with their sexualities, and then reaffirm their friendship and leave the darkness and the blood behind, presumably to return to their "ordinary" lives of dressing like clowns while engaging in shootouts and high-speed car chases.

Une belle fille comme moi

François Truffaut's Une belle fille comme moi is a pitch-black comedy of sexual exploitation in which who's doing the exploiting and who's getting exploited is neatly reversed. Camille (Bernadette Lafont) is the subject of a "sociological thesis" on criminal women, being written by Stanislas Prévine (André Dussollier), a hapless professorial type who listens to Camille's jailhouse confessions with great interest. Camille has had a tough life, it seems, always being desired and exploited by the men she meets, who only want her for sex. Camille, of course, relentlessly turns this state of affairs to her advantage, letting these men take her to bed and have their way with her, while ruthlessly exploiting them in turn, taking their money and plotting various criminal acts surrounding her multiple affairs. Camille is in jail, it seems, for the one crime she actually didn't commit, but there's no lack of criminality in this femme fatale. While Stanislas analyzes her in terms of her unhappy childhood and her bad luck in relationships, suggesting various repressed psychological reasons for her bad behavior, Stanislas' good-girl secretary Hélène (Anne Kreis) asks him to consider the possibility that this girl is just a "tramp."

Truffaut's film is torn between feminist empowerment and the confirmation of old clichés about women who are dangerous, man-eating sluts. Camille could easily be seen as a victim, and this is how Stanislas sees her, influenced by her slightly twisted account of her own experiences. In her own version of her story, she's a victim of the attentions of men, who simply want her for her undeniable sexiness, her carnality. Clovis (Philippe Léotard) picks her up and hides her away in his garage, visiting her for sex whenever he can sneak away from his overbearing mother, until Camille, using an age-old form of sexual blackmail, tricks him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. Later, Camille throws herself at the bar singer Sam Golden (Guy Marchand), who she believes will help her with her own singing career — a prospect that seems doomed by her tone-deaf, cat-screech voice — but instead he is, predictably, only interested in her talents in bed. Similarly, a lawyer (Claude Brasseur) claims he can help Camille get a large settlement in a lawsuit, but actually he too just takes her to bed while tricking her into signing blank forms and trying to eke out payments from her.

The film is full of these traditional examples of male exploitation, all these men using Camille for her sexuality while stringing her along in various ways. And yet Camille consistently turns the tables on the men, using them in turn. It's a portrait of mutual exploitation, in which sexuality is a tool, a weapon, a way of getting what one wants: for the men, sex is often an ends in itself, while for Camille it's simply the means by which she gets men under her control. Truffaut's film both embodies these archetypal situations and mocks them, making a farce out of these cynical power struggles between men and women, in which neither side is really interested in the other for anything but base, selfish reasons.


Driving the film is the powerful, irresistible performance of Bernadette Lafont in the central role. Lafont had made her screen debut in Truffaut's early short Les Mistons, and she'd gone on to be the bad girl muse of Truffaut's New Wave contemporary Claude Chabrol in some of Chabrol's earliest films. This film marked her first collaboration with Truffaut in 15 years, and she delivers a ferocious, comic, sexy performance that very much explains why so many men are drawn to her and allow themselves to be destroyed by her. Lafont is always a delightful screen presence, with a distinctive smile that's almost sweet and childlike, if not for the hint of irony that makes her look as dangerous as she is appealing. She's casually, irreverently sexy, well aware of the effect she has on men, even sprawling around in a prison jumpsuit that she leaves tantalizingly half-buttoned, the front hanging partially open to tempt Stanislas into a more-than-professional relationship with his interview subject.

Lafont provides most of the film's laughs, embodying an irrepressible id with every languidly sexy pose, every out-of-key tune, every smirking bit of double entendre. Without her, the film would fall apart, though Truffaut does craft some fun gags, like the fact that the conceited Sam Golden accompanies his sexual conquests with a soundtrack of recorded car race sounds. But it's Lafont who makes the film so much fun, making her shameless tramp of a character both delightfully funny and strangely sympathetic. Truffaut's depiction of the battle of the sexes is rather simplistic and cynical, recalling the sitcom-level clichés about marriage plaguing his Antoine Doinel film Bed & Board, but here at least, Lafont's Camille vivaciously resists such stereotypes at every turn, even as she simultaneously embodies them.

Two English Girls

François Truffaut's Two English Girls is a moving, haunting, subtly powerful film, a drama of alternating repression and release, sexuality and restraint, purity and excess. It is adapted from what seems to be a rather melodramatic novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, who had also written Jules and Jim, another novel about a love triangle that Truffaut had famously adapted. This second consideration of the theme reverses the situation. Where Jules and Jim was about a woman torn between two men, this film, like the novel it's based on, is about a man and the two women he loves. The film is full of melodramatic contrivances and over-the-top emotions: women faint dramatically while reading letters, lovers are torn apart by solemn pacts, there are hysterical pregnancies and illnesses that seem as much psychological and emotional as physiological.

Truffaut alternately revels in these intense emotions and keeps them at arm's length: like the characters, the film and its director seem torn between repression and release, unsure whether to give in fully to the madness and ecstasy and pain of these emotions or to hold back, to retreat into asceticism. The effect is enthralling and ambiguous, rendering these melodramatics affecting and overwhelming when seen, veiled, through the filter of Truffaut's uncertain distance, his hesitance to fully embrace the passions and excesses of this lurid, tragic romance. Claude (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a typically fickle and promiscuous young man when he meets Ann (Kika Markham), a young English girl visiting France. He's drawn to her, but their relationship remains chaste and friendly, even though Claude is undeniably attracted to her; he calls her his "sister" but thinks about grabbing her hand, about kissing her. She takes him to visit her home in Wales, where she introduces him to her sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter), who she's clearly pushing towards Claude despite her own feelings for the young man.

Muriel is built up before her first appearance; at times it seems as though Ann can speak of nothing but her sister, who remains curiously out of view, her absence consistently emphasized in Truffaut's mise en scène. Her closed door, with Muriel sleeping inside, is lingered over. Her empty place setting at the dinner table becomes a point of fixation for Claude. When the girl finally appears, she's sitting stiffly at the table with bandages wrapped around her face, protecting the fragile eyes that she has strained reading. The glimpses that Claude gets of her eye as she lifts the bandage seem to provoke him and arouse his curiosity even more.

Throughout the film, this tension between Claude and the two sisters keeps erupting in different ways, their loves for one another warped and held back by both their own individual moralities and the societal conventions that keep feelings buttoned up. In many ways, the film is about the erosion of a hypocritical and artificial sexual morality that privileges virginity and "purity" in women while condoning the flighty affairs and indiscretions of men. Both of the sisters, in their different ways, strain against this hypocrisy, and it's the women in the film, not the inconstant and indecisive Claude, for whom Truffaut seems to have the most sympathy. Muriel throws herself into religion, finding an outlet for her feelings in devotion to God, denying sensuality and worldliness: at the peak of her devotion, she's moved to confess, in an astonishing journal that she sends to Claude, that she has a weakness for masturbation that was inculcated in her by a childhood lesbian fling with a friend. In spite of that, she is suspicious of the body, suspicious of physicality, and in that she's the opposite of her sister Ann, who initially seems as repressed and proper as Muriel, but soon reveals a more worldly side as she becomes a sculptor, a world traveler and, eventually, Claude's lover.


Their relationship mostly just exposes Claude's hypocrisy, as he introduces her to his ideas of "free love" but is then clearly heartbroken when she takes him at his word and begins seeing a second lover. Claude is a rather callow young man, and Truffaut is unsparing in his depiction of Claude's mistreatment of women. He has romantic ideas, but they mostly seem to be about himself, about the kind of romantic artist's life he wants to lead, rather than about the women whose love he takes for granted and whose passions he awakens and discards.

Truffaut deftly balances the extreme emotionalism of this story, with all its twists and turns and shifting loves, by alternating between bursts of emotional catharsis and stretches in which feelings remain as buttoned up as the exterior the characters present to the world, making it difficult to know what they're thinking or feeling. The effect is striking. Claude's initial time spent with the two sisters in their home is especially spartan and restrained, with Truffaut keeping his distance as Claude vacillates between the two sisters, while Ann is clearly pushing him towards Muriel. It's not clear at all what any of them are truly thinking or feeling, perhaps because they don't know for sure themselves.

This coolness and detachment is especially effective when it's followed by the occasional raw expressions of deeper feelings that punctuate the film. After Claude abruptly breaks off his engagement to Muriel, a decision that barely seems to affect him, Truffaut cuts Claude out of the picture to focus on the suffering of Muriel when she receives his cold-hearted letter. She writes a series of letters in response and never sends them, pouring out her heartbreak and pain on paper and in the film's voiceover, and then, after all this anguish has exploded messily across the film, Truffaut finally cuts back to Claude in Paris, receiving a cool, reserved, polite, understanding letter from Muriel in which she fails to mention any of the pain that he had caused her.

This is the heart of the film, this gap between the surface and the depths, between the polite face presented to the world and the secret turmoil and strong feelings and conflicted desires that lurk underneath. Truffaut deftly balances the two here, and in the process displays a far greater understanding of love, lust and loss than he ever did in Jules and Jim — that the earlier film is acclaimed while this probing, complex work is not is clearly an injustice. The tension is embodied also in the contrast between the film's literary source — the opening credits roll over images of Roché's novel, the pages dense with scrawled notations — and the cinematic, visual splendor of Nestor Almendros' images. The film is both dazzlingly cinematic in its sensuality and its visual beauty, and literary in its frequent reliance on voiceovers that alternately express forbidden feelings or lie to cover up those feelings. Sensual, emotionally rich, ambiguous and ultimately bittersweet, Two English Girls is one of this director's greatest statements on tragically denied love.