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"Frisson" is the word, as key a principle to Jean Rollin as to Gautier or Lorrain. The crumbling chateau is blue on the outside and red on the inside, it receives the honeymooning couple (Sandra Julien and Jean-Marie Durand) with news of departed relatives and a pair of servants with candelabra perpetually in hand (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce). "This is where the living make a religion of respecting the dead. This is where the dead make a religion of preserving their lives." Still in white veils, the bride heads to the cemetery and bumps into the widow in black veils (Nicole Nancel), elsewhere the groom is practically flattened by an avalanche of library tomes. The cousins return as bloodsucking dandies, played by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Robiolles like d'Orsay and de Musset by way of Heckle and Jeckle. "We were surprised to hear of your deaths. Your reappearance is even more surprising." A rich vein of intoxication, a tale of wedding jitters and bourgeois vampires, Rollin's funniest poem. The flow is set to the metronome of psychedelic prog-rock, the call of unseen seagulls heard upon the heroine's bite returns in Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais. Out of grandfather clocks, from behind bedroom curtains, down chimneys—the wandering vampiress (Dominique) knows how to make an entrance, and packs spiky nipple covers to boot. Jeux de cinéma, a camera that pans in gratuitous circles or stands still as the two chalky aesthetes take turns leaning in. Méliès cuts, Bava spotlights, Anger drollery, "l'ennui mortel de l'immortalité" Cocteau spoke of. Put a frame of braided twigs around a grisly smear on the wall and get a Twombly, roll in the sand with the apostles of perversity and smash the line between perdition and liberation. "Tout est admissible," the upholder of normalcy can only shoot impotently.
--- Fernando F. Croce |