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Having found his Anna Karina in Lina Romay, Jesús Franco introduces the sullen, humid vulturette in black boots and cape, ambling out of the fog and toward the camera. (She bumps her chin into it.) A cursed countess haunting the forests and hotels of Madeira, she lures both men and women with her somnambulistic wiles only to see Eros repeatedly, rudely interrupted by Thanatos. ("He was bitten... in the middle of an orgasm" is the medical verdict.) In this lustrous travesty of Bram Stoker, Lucy is a melancholy baron (Jack Taylor) with a morbid wish to venture "beyond the mist" and Van Helsing is a snooping physician played by the filmmaker. Deprived of people to drain, the heroine writhes like a horizontal odalisque through a procession of Hustler spreads, riding pillows and humping bedposts while the score loops, stretches and mutates from mod ululation to mock-orchestration. Her silence not only allows the zoom lenses to feast on Romay's deadpan pout, but also illustrates Franco's Lacanian distrust of language as language. ("Why is my body once again the desire of death?" Suddenly, the protagonist's abysmal voiceovers become parodies of dialogue itself, paltry before the sensory sublime.) The recurring limousine POV shots are from Duras, the brutish servant from Dracula's Daughter. A languid, symbolist flow brimming with Klimt visions and risqué jests like the sign-in guestbook at the S&M dungeon and a bit of clitorial Braille from a blind mystic at the morgue. "How do we know that the pleasure is not worth life itself?" It is an absurd-poetic mind indeed that can photograph the muse as she flaps diaphanous veils like bat wings atop a coastal cliff. With Anna Watican, Alice Arno, Monica Swinn, Luis Barboo, and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou.
--- Fernando F. Croce |