Louis Malle directed Black Moon, an experimental fantasy horror, starring Cathryn Harrison, Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse and Alexandra Stewart.
It was shown at the 1975 NY Film Festival and was distributed in the US by 20th Century Fox. The film was made in France, but its dialogue is in English.
The film is dedicated to Giehse, who died shortly after shooting had completed.
Lily is attempting to seek refuge amidst an apparent gender-based civil war in which men and women are killing one another.
On a rural road, she encounters men executing women by firing squad, and flees with her car into the woods, following an overgrown road. There, she encounters a flock of sheep gathered around their shepherd, who has hanged himself from a tree. She later comes across a group of women donning military gear and torturing a young man. She abandons her car, fleeing on foot, and falls asleep in a meadow, where she hears the flowers crying in pain. She then witnesses a brown unicorn, followed by woman on horse, and naked children herding a pig.
Lily trails the man to abandoned château located beyond overgrowth on a hill. The house is fully furnished, but inhabited by animals. Upstairs, she finds an elderly bedridden woman chastising her pet rat, Humphrey. The woman proceeds to attack Lily before contacting an unknown person on a transistor radio, making cruel observations of Lily’s appearance and revealing details of how Lily arrived there that she should have no way of knowing. A number of alarm clocks inexplicably go off, and the old woman tries to strangle Lily. When Lily slaps her, the woman dies.
Lily’s attention is diverted by a man singing in the garden. Via telepathy, he communicates to her that his name is also Lily. His sister, also named Lily whom Lily had mistaken for a man earlier, arrives on horseback. Lily attempts to explain to Brother and Sister Lily that their mother is dead, but they are impervious and refuse to speak to her. When she follows them upstairs, she witnesses the old woman return to life before Sister Lily breastfeeds her.
Brother and Sister lock Lily in the room with the old woman. While exploring the room, she eats a piece of cheese and looks through a photo album containing pictures of the old woman, whilst the old woman continues to make observations about her to the unknown person on the radio. To the old woman’s anger, Lily looks out the window and again sees the unicorn. Lily climbs out the window and down the wall, and chases the unicorn around the sprawling property as it continuously eludes her. She is horrified when she stumbles upon the corpse of a female soldier. Brother picks the corpse up and buries it in a grave. The unicorn appears again, and Lily chases it until she trips over the pig and is set upon by the band of nude children. The unicorn once again appears to Lily, and tells her she is mean. The unicorn also tells Lily the old woman upstairs is not real.
Lily observes Sister serving the children dinner. Lily tries to comfort the old woman after another fight with Humphrey, and agrees to breastfeed her. Later, Lily plays Tristan und Isolde on the parlor piano. The children sing along, while Sister paints Brother’s face and they reenact the opera.
At dawn, Lily finds the old woman has disappeared. A hawk flies into the house, which Brother decapitates with a sword. Brother and Sister then battle one another in the garden as Lily watches from the window. Brother beats Sister with a stick, and Sister bashes him in the face with a rock as sounds of gunfire emanate from the woods. Lily climbs into the old woman’s bed and tries unsuccessfully to use the radio.
Outside, a large crowd of sheep and turkeys surround the house. Lily awakens from sleep to find the unicorn in front of the fireplace, and prepares to breastfeed it.
Malle has characterized his film as “opaque, sometimes clumsy, it is the most intimate of my films. I see it as a strange voyage to the limits of the medium, or maybe my own limits.”
Black Moon was shot in Malle’s own 200-year-old manor house and its surrounding 225-acre estate in the lush, wild Dordogne valley in Quercy, near Cahors, called “Le Coual,” or “The Crow’s Call.”
The house and grounds were the initial inspiration: “It began with the fact that I wanted to shoot the film in my own house. Black Moon certainly comes very much from the place where I live, the kind of countryside around the house. There’s something very ancient, maybe archaic about it, also something hostile.”
The film was influenced by his admiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer, shot the film. There were no scenes in which there was direct sunlight. They shot indoor scenes on sunny days until the light was right for the exterior shots.
Malle considered releasing it in a shorter version, and prepared one-hour cut, removing scenes that he felt did not work.
A digitally restored version of the film was released by The Criterion Collection in June 2011.
Time Out wrote, “Malle offers no explanation for his heroine’s visionary odyssey through a world in which all history runs parallel with all realities. Yet a logic is there, even if its reference point is jabberwocky.”
themes, calling it “an hysterical but absorbing Alice-in-Wonderland surrealist fantasy film.”[6] TV Guide gave the film a positive review, calling it “‘[a] haunting, disturbing picture that is half-fantasy, half-reality, but we are never certain which is which.”[7]
Joseph Jon Lanthier of Slant Magazine rated the film three out of five stars, concluding, “Suckling as it does from the budding teat of preadolescent sexuality, it’s not surprising that Black Moon is a tad Malle-nourished.”[8]
Critical Status
Black Moon won French César Awards for Best Sound and Best Cinematography.
