Orbiting the Looking Glass

A pretty young woman flees a civil war between the sexes only to run afoul of murderous sheep and a lazy pony unicorn. 1975's Black Moon is a surreal delight, obviously influenced by Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Lewis Carroll, and maybe Andrei Tarkovsky. It never approaches the level of its influences but it's a perfectly decent string of dream logic and the best movie I've seen from director Louis Malle.

I've only seen a few other Louis Malle films, none of which led me to expect something like Black Moon. Viva Maria is a moderately fun adventure film; Pretty Baby (made subsequently to Black Moon) is an interesting drama but not something I'd go out of my way to watch twice. I've only seen part of Au revoir le enfants--I caught the beginning on TV decades ago and wasn't able to finish for some reason. But was already finding it sentimental and annoying in the manner of many prestigious European films of the late '80s. None of those films have the bedrock of perverse fun to be found in Black Moon.

Lily (Cathryn Harrison) escapes from a male firing squad killing female soldiers and from a gang of female soldiers executing a male soldier. She ends up at a beautiful old manor house (belonging to Malle in real life, according to Wikipedia). In the lushly furnished interior, the soundtrack is briefly taken over by a cat walking on the piano.

She meets a bedridden old woman (Therese Giehse) who communicates with a large rat in gibberish and demands women bare their breasts to her so she can suckle. Lily's shirt seems to unbutton on its own throughout the film. In one scene, her panties continually fall off while she's trying to sternly lecture the old woman. I kept expecting them to fall off in a later scene--it would've been a good, potentially very funny, visual callback, but it didn't happen.

There's a gang of naked children running around, chasing a pig Lily occasionally runs into as well as the very handsome Joe Dallesandro who seems to come to kissing Lily. His character's name might also be Lily, or at least that's what the female Lily appears to deduce from telepathy. Is this a comment on the conflict between the sexes introduced in the beginning? It's hard to say.

In Bunuel's surreal films, even if it's not clear what something symbolises, you get an instinctive sense of his attitude about a topic, an argument that can't quite be put into words. Black Moon doesn't have that. It's closer to Lewis Carroll except Lily herself produces as much nonsense as the people in her environment.

Ultimately, the ideas in this film don't run very deep but watching a pretty girl try to navigate weird things in a beautiful manor house is enough to please me.

Black Moon is available on The Criterion Channel.