Black Moon (1975)

Black Moon is a French fantasy film first released in 1975, directed by Louis Malle.  The film stars Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dallesandro.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


An adolescent young woman, Lily, is making her way across war-ravaged countryside.  She witnesses an execution of a dozen or so women by armed soldiers and narrowly escapes capture.  She arrives at an isolated house which appears to be deserted, until she discovers a bedridden old woman.  A young man and woman appear – but Lily seems to be unable to communicate with them.  Nothing around her makes sense.  She sees a herd of naked children, a unicorn taunts her, and the old woman converses with a giant rat in an unknown language…

Black Moon is one of the few truly experimental films to have been made since WWII, a bizarre free-flowing expressionist fantasy which evokes the early work of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel.  It is such an unusual film that it is virtually unrecognisable as the work of French director Louis Malle, who was by and large a pretty conventional filmmaker, with a talent for making quality films that appealed to both critics and the public.

This is Louis Malle’s most inaccessible and baffling film – a kind of dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland in which the laws of logic and coherence, so essential in our universe, are held in abeyance.  It’s tempting to try to make sense of the narrative – are we being shown a dream, the frenzied hallucinations of a schizophrenic girl or everyday life in a parallel universe? – but Malle does just about everything he can to thwart such a venture.   The film is intended to be beyond our understanding.

The film’s lack of coherence and deliberate ambiguity are certainly frustrating, ensuring that it was never going to be a commercial success.  However, the pedigree of both its director and its cinematographer (Sven Nykvist, who worked for Ingmar Bergman) makes it difficult to write it off as a complete misfire.  There is something deeply unsettling about Black Moon , something that holds your attention even though there is, apparently, absolutely no sense to it.  Maybe this isn’t a rambling, incomprehensible fantasy after all, but rather a clever allegory of contemporary life, where social breakdown is increasingly evident and man seems ever driven to pervert the laws of nature for his own end.  Could Black Moon be how an alien being would see the world we now inhabit, or is it perhaps something more – a glimpse into our not to distant future?

© James Travers 2007

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