I'd been in the mood to watch Louis Malle's 1975 surrealist film Black Moon again for a while but just recently got around to it. It's funny, the Wikipedia entry describes it as an "experimental fantasy horror film". "Experimental" is the only adjective that really fits. It's not really fantasy because there's no underlying logic to the strange things happening and it's not really horror because, at least to me, there's nothing in it that seems like it's meant to be scary. "Surrealist" is one tidy word that seems to cover it.
I like it by it wouldn't be my first choice if I were recommending films of its kind. And as strange as it is, there are quite a few films like it. I mainly wanted to watch it because I'd watched Valerie and Her Week of Wonders too many times. It was also clearly influenced by Tarkovsky and Bunuel. And, of course, Lewis Carroll. It's a story of a pretty blonde girl having a series of bizarre encounters in a strange place.
The urge to make an adult Alice in Wonderland has seemed to haunt writers and filmmakers and video game designers for 60 years now. There are the literal derivations, like American McGee's Alice or Twisted Wonderland but the '60s and '70s produced a number of projects that have more of a general thematic influence. Black Moon's Alice is called Lily and she was played by Cathryn Harrison who, I only just realised, was only 16 when she made the movie. We meet Lily driving a car in some gloomy European countryside. She comes across male soldiers executing female soldiers and flees, eventually ending up at a strange manor. An old woman upstairs speaks to a large rat and laughs at Lily when Lily's panties inexplicably start falling down to her ankles. There is, as usual, much more of a sexual tone to this story than there is in Alice in Wonderland.
Instead of a white rabbit, Lily pursues a kind of unicorn. This unicorn in a fat pony with an excessively long horn.
The film seems to be saying something about nature versus civilisation, a point which is clearest in a scene like the one in which a gang of naked children, who'd been seen chasing a pig earlier, are transfixed when Lily plays Wagner on the piano.
I see on YouTube now a number of clips from the movie have been posted as ASMR. It's funny how an old movie can change for new cultural contexts. I guess it is kind of a relaxing sensory experience at times. There's very little dialogue. In this scene, Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro communicates with Lily by touching her shoulders.
Black Moon is available on The Criterion Channel.
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