Salvation Magazine Issue 1 - Magazine - Page 13
Jean Rollin
ably no more than five minutes of dialogue in total during the entire movie
and most of the incidents happen without any explanation. It’s a beautiful
and ultimately quite a melancholy exercise on creative freedom and I can
only imagine what drive-in audiences expecting babes and bondage must
have thought.
It’s not all great – the final half-hour tends to drag somewhat, and even
by Rollin standards, this one is going to divide audiences. If you are not
attuned to Rollin’s sensibilities then the over-the-top vampire fangs, some
terrible special effects and the very, very strange acting styles won’t be
for everyone. If you are connected to Rollin’s ethereal approach, then the
scenes of naked girls being tortured in a dungeon might seem like an ugly
intrusion (as indeed they are - Rollin was forced to include the scenes
against his will). But this is, nevertheless, one of his most interesting movies and perhaps the culmination of his style - there seemed nowhere that
Rollin could really take the vampire film after this without either repeating himself or being pushed further into commercial sex and horror styles.
Indeed, his next film - The Iron Rose, made in 1973 - was a more personal movie for Rollin, a bizarre, essentially plotless study of madness and the
love of death that oozes with atmosphere and striking visuals but throws
out the supernatural and (for the most part) the erotic.
The film follows two thinly drawn characters – a girl (Francoise Pascal) and a boy (Hugues Quester) as they meet at a wedding and set up a
date the next day. This eventually takes them to a huge, ancient cemetery,
where he convinces her to make out in a tomb. But when they emerge,
it’s nighttime, and they cannot find their way out. As they wander around
looking for the exit, the girl becomes more and more fixated – possibly,
arguably possessed – by the spirit of the dead, and the boy becomes increasingly aggressive and desperate.
ollin drops hints of sinister things to come early on. In a nod to
what audiences might have expected from a Rollin movie, the
cemetery seems to have a resident vampire - who we see brief ly
early on, but who has no part in the narrative - and its fair share
of sinister-looking visitors, including Rollin himself. However,
the film quickly evolves into something very unique – closer to the works
of Alain Renais or Bunuel (his Exterminating Angel also features people
inexplicably trapped in a location). The cemetery, in the daytime a run
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His story is a romanticised
tale of vampirism, with our
living heroes being drawn
into the vampire cult out
of love, not malice.
earning his lesson perhaps, Rollin doesn’t saddle Requiem pour un
Vampire (released in America under the spectacularly misleading
title of Caged Virgins) with any sort of developed story. The film
starts out mid-scene, opening with the bizarre image of two young
girls dressed as clowns in the middle of a car chase/shoot-out that
is not explained or set up at all; we are left to guess the back story to this as
if explaining it would simply be too boring. Right away, we can see that the
film is more interested in creating an atmosphere than telling a story. But
brief ly – our two heroines (played with blank expressions by Marie-Pierre
Castel and Mireille Dargent) find themselves lost in the countryside and
stumble upon a crumbling chateau and nearby cemetery where things are
clearly not right, as the dead bodies, arms sticking out of walls and skulls
as decoration would confirm. They are chased and captured by the servants of the Last Vampire, who intends to make the two young virgins
into converts, in turn using them to seduce locals – but Castel is instead
seduced by a passing young man.
Rollin uses this thin plot as an excuse for a series of extraordinary visuals with little regard as to whether they make sense or not. There is prob-
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down, atmospheric pace of the dead, becomes a maze and possibly an alternative universe, and it is the atmosphere more than any supernatural
aspect that I suspect possesses the girl. Apart from a quick fantasy trip to
Rollin’s favourite beach location (a chance to have Pascal frolic naked in a
film otherwise devoid of the producer-required nudity and eroticism), the
film never leaves this increasingly claustrophobic location, and neither do
its two leads.
Francoise Pascal gives a remarkable performance. Rollin’s films are not
generally known for their acting, but he undoubtedly had the ability to
draw a melancholic sense of necromanticism from his better actresses (he
would do a similar thing in The Living Dead Girl years later). Pascal seems
entirely possessed by her character – her transition from terror to acceptance to a strange sort of joy in death being remarkable, as she moves from
peril to pleasure in a way that is intense and unnerving. Her smile at the
film’s finale is chilling.
Salvation/11
