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Baudelaire's "Le Flacon" and no mistake, "je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence!" Experimental pesticide lies at the root, shoddy masks won't protect the laborers spraying vineyards, one of them shuffles into a train with his visage oozing off to curtail the heroine's autumn vacation. She (Marie-Georges Pascal) escapes into the countryside, her stop at the farmhouse ends with the paterfamilias begging to be run over after skewering his daughter with a pitchfork. "Une épidémie," dusk light into gloom, the amble to the village is alongside a blind maiden (Mirella Rancelot) last seen taking a hatchet to the neck. ("Je t'aime," cries the peasant to the blank-eyed noggin he's just decapitated, a woeful refrain echoed by his contaminated brethren.) The flawless body amidst foamy carcasses, cf. Cronenberg's Rabid, it belongs to the grinning blonde (Brigitte Lahaie) who wields torches and hounds and embraces dynamite. "You are wondering if I'm normal. Can't you tell?" The countless shades of putrefaction, the waking dream of utter breakdown, Jean Rollin's Weekend in other words. Not mindless zombies but suffering wretches, as befits Camus territory, the brain that knows the inexorability of violence even as it drips down the brow. It pays to drink beer in the face of tainted wine, a high-angled long shot gives a field of grapes reddened with rot. Memories of the Resistance, courtesy of a couple of carabiniers (Félix Marten, Patrice Valota): "It's not about fighting for your country. It's about fighting against the Fascist. There's a difference." The tableaux build to an unforgettable freeze-frame, you face the void and it bleeds on you. Haneke's Le temps du loup is an antiseptic variant. With Serge Marquand, Patricia Cartier, Michel Herval, Paul Bisciglia, and Evelyne Thomas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |