Black Moon (1975)

I love this movie so much

Wonderful Movie

Excellent but underrated film

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Whilst a fan of his magnificent French New Wave Film Noir Lift to the Scaffold, I for some reason have never got round to seeing the other creations by auteur Louis Malle. Talking to a DVD seller,I found out he had recently tracked down an off-beat sounding title by Malle,which led to me looking up to the sky for the dark moon.View on the film:Playing out the first 15 minutes with muffled radio noise being the lone dialogue, the screenplay by Louis Malle & Joyce Buñuel, (she would soon divorce her then-husband Juan Luis Buñuel) give the dialogue a clipped,fairy tale-style presentation, via the characters being limited to first names or descriptions, ("The Old Lady") and the murmurs of a literal battle of the sexes encourages Lilly to crawl deeper into the dream-scape of the house. Taking soil from the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,the writers spin Alice's fantasy adventure into a more surrealist direction with the random running around of naked children, (thankfully without Carroll's signs of paedophile) the breastfeeding of the old lady and a unicorn (!),and fellow guests at the house disappearing into air drawing out Lilly's fantasy of childhood,into the snake of adulthood.Retaining his independent French New Wave spirit by shooting the entire film on his own 200-year-old manor house and its surrounding 225-acre, director Malle and cinematographer Sven Nykvist take advantage of the limitations by giving Lilly's adventures a closed-off appearance,where every attempt she makes to leave, leads Lilly back to the house. Making everyone else round the house fade-out like ghosts,Malle gathers snippets of reality with close-ups held in silence glimpsing at the reality Lilly is leaving.Beautifully using forced perspective to keep Lilly at a child's height, Malle wraps the surrealism in a grotesque,oddly enchanting oder, with the unicorn and birds being given a rotting appearance, and the Old Lady/mother stand-in only being able to survive thanks to breast milk. Sipping on her last performance, Therese Giehse casts a great, unsettling mood as the Old Lady,whose mumbled words Giehse uses to keep Lilly permanently unsettled. Dreaming to escape from the unfolding battle of the sexes,Cathryn Harrison elegantly threads Lilly's child sense of wonder with a sensitive maturity that glows as the black moon rises.

I'll give it a two because the lighting and the cinematography are well executed. Also, one would have to say that the scenes were probably directed as well as they could have been.That being said, there is no plot. It is a jumble of senseless scenes. There may be a statement in there somewhere, but it is my opinion that the job of the filmmaker is to make the point clearly. Not to hide it in nonsensical scenes. Sure, we all like a mystery, but the mystery shouldn't be what the plot is. I mean a baby, wearing a necklace, lying with two swords, while two strange children sing opera (they sing it actually quite beautifully) and naked children dance around, a woman paints war paint on her brother, other naked children play with jewelry... it just becomes cumbersome. Perhaps the intent was to make this movie literally painful to watch.I know that there is an audience for this stuff... somewhere... but the vast majority of people (even the type of people that like some of the more strange movies, or avant guard movies) will not like it. As other reviewers have said, there are so many other movies out there. Ones that actually tell a story that you can comprehend that do not involve 16 year old girls breast feeding old ladies that talk to wallabies. Hey, you might even find one that doesn't involve a man cutting the wing off an eagle! I know that all these images have some background story that is related to some mythology, but who really cares? If it doesn't tell the story of the mythology, or doesn't inform us what these things mean, hasn't it failed as a film? I suppose it depends on what the director intended. In this case, it appears that the director intended for people to have no idea what the subject matter is about, and for his movie to be seen by as few people as possible. A shame really. He had the opportunity, the means, the resources to make a movie (something many of us dream of doing, but lack the resources) and he used it on this. As I stated earlier: The lighting is beautiful. The cinematography well done. The technical aspects performed so well. All wasted.If you have the opportunity to watch this film, even if you are a film buff, a huge movie nerd, don't. It's a waste of your time.

Weird for the sake of weird, which is great if you're into that. I am, most certainly, and I found this oft-dismissed take on Alice in Wonderland endlessly beautiful and fascinating. Frustratingly esoteric, yes, but if you just appreciate it for what it is and don't get lost in the symbolism, it can work. Cathryn Harrison (who co-starred in Robert Altman's Images a few years prior) plays a young woman named Lily who is trying to escape from an apocalyptic war zone (it seems that the battle of the sexes has come to its culmination, and men and women are slaughtering each other willy-nilly). She soon discovers a chubby, brown unicorn which she follows (as Alice does the white rabbit). It leads her to an out-of-the-way mansion in the middle of nowhere, and it's populated by a dying old woman, her twin grandchildren (an androgynous set of male-female twins, both named Lily, just as the heroine) and an unspecific number of always-nude children who run around the farm driving various sheep and swine. The rest of the movie has Harrison wandering around the farm and mansion, observing the odd behaviors of the inhabitants. Basically, it's just a bunch of completely weird stuff, but it's always gorgeous, hypnotic and dreamy. And often very funny, too. Many will find the film dull, but if you like this kind of thing, it's a must-see. Luis Bunuel's daughter Joyce collaborated on the screenplay.

The free-flowing narrative of "Black Moon" is hard to describe,but basically it's the story of a teenager(Cathryn Harrison)who witnesses a war between the sexes and finds herself involved in numerous dream-like situations at a country estate.She meets strange family,naked children and various animals including unicorn.Obviously inspired by "Alice in the Wonderland" and Robert Altman's "Images" "Black Moon" is truly bizarre and unforgettable.Here is what Louis Malle said about this peculiar fantasy piece:"I don't know how to describe "Black Moon" because it's a strange melange-if you want,it's a mythological fairy-tale taking place in the near future.There are several themes;one is the ultimate civil war...the war between men and women.I say the 'ultimate civil war,'because through the 1970s we'd been watching all this fighting between people of different religions and races and political beliefs.And this was,of course,the climax and great moment of women's liberation.So we follow a young girl,in this civil war;she's trying to escape and in the middle of the woods she finds a house which seems to be abandoned.When she enters the house,she obviously enters another world;she's in the presence of an old lady in bed,who speaks a strange language and converses with a huge rat on her bedside table.She goes from discovery to discovery-it's a sort of initiation."