Saw it on cable the other day. It was AMAZING. I couldn’t believe how bad it was. You know how some films just seem to be made to fulfill the worst stereotypes of their genre? Well, that’s “Black Moon,” a beautifully photographed film that has no brains at all. Louis Malle committed the film. No wonder he had to flee to America.
How does it compare to Last Year at Marienbad?
Was it BORING, too? And not even gratuitous nudity could save it? How about gratuitous politics? Did it have naked people spouting Marxist slogans until you wished they’d just put their clothes on and shut up?
OK, I’ll describe it and you decide. We start with a woman driving through a woodsy road at high speed. In the distance we hear artillery fire. She runs over a weasel or something for no reason, and when she gets out to look at it we see tht she’s dressed in a uniform and wearing a cap, so that she looks about as mannish as someone with her fine, delicate features and pretty eyes can. Which isn’t very.
She comes to a roadblock with an artillery piece on the road. A bunch of men in military uniforms are staffing it. She’s the only person at the roadblock. Before they get over to her, a couple of men drag out a bunch of prisoners and line them up at the roadside. The prisoners are all females in military uniforms. One of the guys kisses one of the prisoners. Then they gun the women down.
When the leader comes over to check out the women in the car (the protagonist, let’s call her Alice) he pulls off her cap and her long blonde hair spills out. Terrified, she drives through the roadblock with bullets whizzing around her, going right off the road.
She drives through woods and fields for a long time. Quite a long time. A very long time. (Only loooooove can pad the film? Not so.) She finally winds up somewhere where she can’t drive any further, so she gets out of the car and walks. She sees more people in uniform kicking and beating another person in uniform. I couldn’t tell if it was women beating up a male prisoner or vice versa. She’s frightened and continues on on foot.
She encounters a beast that looks like a shag carpet remnant with a horn stuck on it. It is a unicorn. It disappears. She finally comes to a farmhouse whose human inhabitants include a woman who rides a horse, a man who rides a horse, and a bunch of children who run around stark naked and yell a lot. Oh, and there’s this grandmother sort of person who tries to strangle Alice every time she gets within grabbing range, but she’s pretty much confined to a bed so she’s not so dangerous. Still, Alice gets strangled a surprising number of times. She finally lets the old lady suckle at her breasts so everything is OK between them, but that’s after several stranglings.
Alice has various adventures around the farm, involving such things as having difficulty reaching a large glass of milk, watching sheep being herded by naked children, and attending a feast. The also talks briefly with the shag carpet unicorn again, but it still isn’t saying anything useful. (There’s not much dialogue in this film, and none of it makes sense.)
The film does not so much end as peter out. There couldn’t really be an ending because once Alice got to the farmhouse, there was no story, just incidents. Dull ones, too.
Louis Malle knew his film didn’t make sense. He said it was a journey and invited viewers to suspend rationality and go along on the journey.
I think there are a LOT of filmmakers who would like viewers to do that.
I have a theory based on the fact that the farmhouse in the film was Mr. Malle’s place. I think he had a big wad of money and a commitment to make a film, but absolutely no creative ideas. So he made up some bullcrap about a war between men and women, kidnapped some children from the local orphanarium and had them run around naked, got an attractive but witless actress, and filmed them doing hijinks for a couple of days. The end. And his production costs are so low that even if the film tanks like a stone canary, he still makes a profit.
Sadly, some people see it as a wonderful coming of age story. I see it as a cynical turning of profit story.
I’ve never sat through “Last Year At Marienbad.” This does not mean it is more boring than “Black Moon” however. In order for me to sit through something as boring as either of these films, special conditions have to exist. It has to be on TV, and I have to be working at something fairly engaging on the computer so I won’t turn the channels, but not so engaging that I completely ignore the film. This has only happened a few times in my life. I admit, though, I deliberately stuck with Black Moon because I realized early on it might be a truly horrible film I could mock with glee.
The brilliance of this sentence cannot be overstated. I imagine walking into a room and overhearing that being the last thing said in a conversation before everyone stops talking and stands around uncomfortably.
I’m dying to see this film, mainly based on this quote from IMDB
Sounds like art to me :dubious: :dubious: :dubious:
Oh, yeah, there’s a scene where her panties keep falling off. Real Art Frahm stuff. To wit:
If you want impenetrable free-form Euro art-house, can I recommend Jacques Rivette’s four hour long meditation on the process of artistic creation La Belle Noiseuse. Nothing much happens, but Emmanuelle Beart does spend much of the film naked in a series of bendy poses.
I believe that one critic once compared European art film to a $30 haute cuisine dinner consisting of a half-dollar size serving of meat on a piece of lettuce and a crouton: “refined, but not very satisfying”.
I just saw Children of Men. I’ll assume Black Moon is worse, but it can’t be by much.