Black Moon (1975)
Directed by Louis Malle

Film Review

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 was one of the last films that director Louis Malle made in France before his move to America in the late 1970s and is probably the most atypical in his entire oeuvre. A contemporary of the French New Wave, Malle is far better known for his intimate low-key dramas - Le Feu follet (1963), Le Souffle au coeur (1971) and Au revoir, les enfants (1987) - and stylish thriller Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), although some of his films show a flair for experimentation - Zazie dans le métro (1960), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994).

Black Moon is in a league of its own. Malle's most inaccessible and baffling film, it presents a kind of dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland in which any notion of logic and coherence appears to have been abolished.  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 deliberately defies any attempt at rationalisation.

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 (famous for his work on Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1962) and Persona (1966)) are borne out by the film's alluring artistry. What may to us look like an incomprehensible fantasy may in fact be an ingenious allegory of our time - 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?

Film Synopsis

The world is caught in an interminable war in which men round up women and execute them.  An adolescent girl named Lily narrowly escapes the same fate as she makes her way across a war-torn landscape.  Even in the remote countryside, the sounds of war are all around.  Finally, Lily arrives at a seemingly deserted house in the middle of nowhere.  Inside, she finds a bedridden old woman who communicates with a rat and speaks into the microphone of an improvised radio transmitter.  After being attacked by the old woman, Lily runs out into the garden and is met by a singing man.  The latter's brother then appears on horseback.  A succession of strange and frightening visions assail Lily as she tries to make sense of her new predicament.  She sees herds of naked children running about, snakes in a drawer and a talking unicorn.  Lily wants to escape, but she cannot.  It is like being in a dream...