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"Is it a hospital? Is it a prison?" Long before he's sent to the asylum, the leather-jacketed misfit (Jean-Pierre Mocky) is already bumping his head into the walls of alienation, running in circles even as he rides his bike up and down hills. Social and political imbalances are to be promptly washed out of the bourgeoisie's hair, "wild beasts in any society must be rendered harmless," the head of the psychiatric hospital (Pierre Brasseur) sees to that. Situated on a tranquil countryside with a graveyard and piles of mangled cars in the back, the institute is adorned with brick columns and checkerboard floors and filled with black uniforms contrasted with white straitjackets—the sinister edifices of Georges Franju's documentaries (one of the military relics from Hôtel des Invalides is here among the patients) rolled into an exposé out of Kafka and Foucault. The debate is between old and new medical guards, a complicated split: The progressive doctor is played by Paul Meurisse with a whiff of villainous oiliness left over from Les Diaboliques, while Brasseur's reactionary overseer is an unbending pragmatist who sees himself as civilization's protector and prisoner. (The difference between sinners and patients is that hell comes only later to sinners, he tells a priest.) Charles Aznavour recounting his dreams of sailing into freedom (a stalled ship in the beginning serves as teen hangout, jukebox and all), Anouk Aimée in her trenchcoat emerging from the darkness, the burning meadows the protagonist dashes through in his escape—remarkable visions of tenebrous imprisonment filmed by Eugen Schüfftan in what could be called clinical noir. Edith Scob in the church choir is already the cracked porcelain of Les Yeux sans Visage. With Jean Galland, Jean Ozenne, Thomy Bourdelle, Rudy Lenoir, Roger Legris and Henri San Juan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |