Black Moon

I’ve written about two Louis Malle films for Montage Film Reviews in the past – ‘Milou En Mai’ (May Fools - 1990) and ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ (Goodbye Children - 1987) – noting how they both perfectly represented this consistent and reliable director’s extraordinary knack for exploring political issues from the humanistic perspective of convincing individuals, thus making their situations all the more affecting and compelling. However, his 1975 offering ‘Black Moon’ marks something of a sidestep from this style and unfortunately winds up being a disappointment. Fittingly it was also the most badly received film of his illustrious career, failing to attract a positive reception from either audiences or critics. Its inconsistencies in style and genre with the rest of his oeuvre isn’t the problem, as Malle built his career on forever avoiding the auteur trappings favoured by his French New Wave contemporaries such as Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. He often chose to make films in various genres, settings and languages, as evidenced by his two most well received films being the aforementioned Au Revoir Les Enfants, a French language study of how the Nazi occupation affected boys in a privileged boarding school, and ‘My Dinner With Andre’ (1981), an American-set English language piece revolving solely around a conversation taking place between two aging playwrights. What ties his more popular films together is instead his humanistic approach and focus on believable characters.

The main problem with ‘Black Moon’ is that the film’s pursuit of avant-garde elements in the setting, narrative, style, and form doesn’t allow for his natural qualities to ever take hold. It isn’t a total failure however: at this point in his career Malle seemed incapable of producing anything entirely devoid of merit, and the film certainly contains some memorable images and atmospheres, two of the aspects you’d expect from the non-narrative trappings of surreal films. It is just that the film doesn’t gel as a whole and results in the distinct feeling of a project made too far outside of its director’s comfort zone. This is even more disappointing when you consider that many of the expected elements of a decent surrealist avant-garde film are present. The German actress Therese Giehse plays a bedridden old woman hooked up a retro-futurist life support machine that she uses to communicate with some unseen ally. She became famous for her friendship with the hugely influential German theatre writer Bertolt Brecht and so already had an impressive history of pushing the boundaries of narrative forms. Malle also collaborated on the film’s brief dialogue excerpts with Joyce Bunuel, daughter of Luis Bunuel who in 1929 famously collaborated with Salvador Dali on ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (An Andalusia Dog) to create one of the first true surrealist films. Star of Andy Warhol’s underground cinema Joe Dallesandro also has a non-speaking role in the film, cementing ‘Black Moon’s experimental ambitions even further. Such elements show that Malle certainly researched his film well and knew his stuff in the field of edgier non-narrative filmmaking. Why then do these references fail to gel and cause the film to fail in its ambitions?

The answer is not initially clear as the film begins rather encouragingly with a visually striking opening. A static long-shot of a badger snuffling around in the middle of the road in a downcast French countryside setting is a suitably absurd image rudely interrupted by a fast approaching car that fails to stop in time, running the poor badger over. It is being driven by Lily (Catheryn Harrison), a fragile looking blonde French girl. After some further driving Lily encounters some kind of warfare. A line of women in army gear are lined up then gunned down by a group of similarly military-attired men. On spying Lily, they turn on her, so she drives away and hides away in the countryside. It is an expertly shot, visually arresting sequence that flits discomfortingly from the absurd to the horrific, made more ominous by the beautiful rural setting being virtually deserted and silent apart from the occasional misplaced sounds of war. Following her escape from the military men the rest of the film fails to live up to this impressive opening. Wandering through the fields of grass Lily encounters many animals which Malle’s camera lingers over with an almost anthropological eye for detail. She then sees a typical French country mansion house (Malle’s own) which provides the setting for the remaining film’s actions: these amount to a relentless series of absurd images and scenarios involving her, the aforementioned old lady, and Sister and Brother Lily (Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dallesandro), a mysterious couple who appear and disappear seemingly at random, don’t speak, and may not even be real. Animals also come and go in a magical and sometimes sinister fashion. Lily repeatedly witnesses a group of naked children following and goading a large pig, as well as a mysterious unicorn that Lily comes to believe has the answer to just what is going on with the war and the house. Of course, the unicorn can and eventually does talk to her, but still fails to offer any reasonable explanations to her or us, the audience.

A telling quote from the director himself reveals that he was maybe slightly confused about his motives too. "I don't know how to describe ‘Black Moon’ because it's a strange melange… it's a mythological fairy-tale taking place in the near future. There are several themes; one is the ultimate civil war...the war between men and women… because through the 1970s we'd been watching all this fighting…and this was, of course, the climax and great moment of women's liberation. So, we follow a young girl, in this civil war; she's trying to escape.” Malle is of course referring to the decade in which feminism went over-ground and entered the mainstream, particularly in the field of film studies, spearheaded by writers such as Laura Mulvey and her hugely influential 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”. The idea of a director such as Malle exploring such huge seismic cultural and sociological shifts is a brilliant idea and if he’d tackled the changing mores in gender roles and women’s equality in his usual realist style then ‘Black Moon’ could have been a classic to rank alongside his best. However more often than not any exploration of these themes gets buried under the film’s increasing tide of fairy tale indulgence and grotesque weirdness. The opening shots of men and women actually engaged in armed combat resembling an actual war are incredibly gauging and would have been a much more effective treatment had he stuck with it. However, once inside the house the film’s constant slips of reality reveal that the war may not even be happening. Instead we get images of a confused abusive old lady who is occasionally and disturbingly breast-fed by Sister Lily, and many scenes of the young Lily in various stages of undress, torment, and confusion as she wanders the house and its grounds. What little dialogue there is remains painfully oblique and disjointed, an effect not helped by the English dubbing (about 40% of it is also spoken by animals). Lily also occasionally grapples with the man of the house, Brother Lily. He is first glimpsed digging in the garden and singing in an opera style voice. He doesn’t have any real dialogue but this is perhaps a blessing as ‘Little Joe’, as he was famously dubbed in Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side, was never the greatest actor, more of a pretty face perfectly given to Warhol’s detached non-directing style that required its stars to simply be themselves in front of his camera’s passive gaze.

Like nearly all of Malle’s films there is very little music, diegetic or otherwise, and it doesn’t help that the pacing is unbelievably slow even for an avant-garde film. Moments of drama or genuinely arresting images are few, apart from the brilliant opening. In this respect it could be argued that Malle also fails to make proper use of his impressive mansion location. The huge country house has been a staple of French cinema from Jean Renoir’s masterpiece ‘Le Regle Du Jeu’ (The Rules of the Game - 1939) onwards, providing the site of many a familial breakdown or comedic romp. This is perhaps because the house was the director’s own, making Malle almost too free to do what he wanted, freeing from the trappings of shooting on a built set or a public location. In short, the film’s elements never really gel or say anything too interesting despite the obvious pedigree of the cast and crew involved. I’m a huge fan of Louis Malle and of surrealist cinema too, and so wanted to like ‘Black Moon’, but if anything it stands as an example of how directors who are skilled and established in creating moving and dramatic human stories of real life drama or comedy should be wary of dabbling with surrealist film tropes, one of which is a lack of professional technique and narrative. At this point in his career Malle was incredibly adept at subtle storytelling and had a masterly yet un-showy technique to his directing, which can probably explain his failure in directing the uncharacteristically surreal ‘Black Moon’.

Watch

Country: France/West
Germany Budget: £
Length: 100mins

Bibliography:
Visual Pleasure In The Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey

Filmography:
‘Milou En Mai’, 1990, Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’ 1987, Louis Malle, Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF)
‘My Dinner with Andre’, 1991, Louis Malle, Saga Productions Inc.
‘Un Chien Andalou’, 1929, Luis Buñuel
‘Le Regle De Jeu’, 1939

Pub/2009

More like this:
'Au Revoir Les Enfants', 1987, directed by Louis Malle
'Le Souffle (Deep Breath)' 2001, directed by Damien Odoul
'Funny Games', 1997, directed by Michael Haneke