|
Gift of the bite, end of the bloodline. "Come experience our love." A distant view of a field emulates a famous shot from Bonnie and Clyde, here the fugitives shadowed by passing clouds are a pair of miniskirts donning greasepaint. Pigtails on the run (Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent), charmingly deadpan, handy with pistols. Tranquil meanders in the countryside, the ruined chateau exerts a certain pull. A cozy bed amid crumbling rock suits the heroines, their snuggling is interrupted by rotting corpses in the dungeon, cowled skeletons at the altar, and pasty vampires on the make. "Perdu... pour toujours." The Jean Rollin distillate, cinema as a blunt instrument for the obsessive delectation of the physical and the mystical. (A stroll in the cemetery leads to a hand reaching out from under the dirt, which points up Dreyer's Vampyr as the crucial model.) "They will perpetuate our race," declares the wizened head fiend, one of the girls fancies the possibility of eternal life while the other prefers the human world alongside a hunky passerby (Philippe Gasté). A clown's bullets through a windshield kick off the somnambule style, the slain accomplice's eyes are tenderly closed before gas is poured over his head and the getaway car goes up in flames. Landscapes and nudes à la Courtat, green tinge around caskets and blue filter for a bit of melancholy flogging. A grand piano amid tenebrous trees and graves, the camera pans to find illuminated doors like pricks in the gloom. Fang marks on a maiden's bosom, bats between her legs. "Les Anges impuissants se damneraient pour moi," rhapsodizes Baudelaire, Rollin is more direct: "You can't be a virgin and a vampire." With Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle, and Paul Bisciglia.
--- Fernando F. Croce |