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The opening gives the high allure of the imagistic approach, a hand on a book segues into maidens waltzing on a drawbridge, which segue into genteel figures in a dripping abattoir. Drinking blood for anemia is the therapy à la mode, bourgeois patients are duly alarmed by the extravagant delectation of the lass who dips her finger in the glass and paints her lips with the liquid. "Death sometimes takes the form of seduction," so learns the thieving dandy (Jean-Marie Lemaire) on the run with a chest of gold coins, the chateau by the lake makes for a handy hideout. Beauties in nightgowns (Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Maï) receive the stranger with mock-vulnerability, he responds to vague warnings with amused disbelief. "Now I need an explanation." The proximity to Rivette is most striking, Duelle in particular, above all Jean Rollin bestows the gift of Feuillade in color. Lahaie offers herself to the Apache hoods besieging the castle, one of them ravishes her in the stables ("People like you think I'm crazy, degenerate. But no, I'm just a little bit special") and meets the sharp end of a dagger mid-tryst, she makes short work of the others with scythe in hand. A feminine gathering at nightfall, not a vampirocracy but a club of chic demoiselles inaugurating the new century by luxuriating in forbidden cravings. Dances and games of blind man's bluff, the doyenne (Fanny Magier) is styled after María Casares in Cocteau's Orphée and momentarily dominated by the lout's burning cigar, then it's midnight, "now you're ours." The fatal blonde is consumed, the brunette savior turns out to be the true reaper, the punchline is that romance can't compete with thirst. "Que ton poème soit le sang de ta coupure." (Aragon) With Muriel Montossé, Sophie Noël, Evelyne Thomas, Cyril Val, and Myriam Watteau.
--- Fernando F. Croce |