Black Moon

I recently watched "Black Moon" from Turner Classic Movies' Louis Malle marathon, and could hardly believe that I was really watching it. Something this insane has to be a hallucination. Maybe I'm not far off; as it turns out, Louis Malle was trying to make a movie based on a dream. I wonder if this is the movie Steven Soderbergh was talking about in "Waking Life," the movie that was "a dream within a dream." If so, Billy Wilder was right: He lost two and a half million dollars.

"Black Moon" is practically Zardozian. I haven't seen "Zardoz," the John Boorman fiasco with Sean Connery running around in a red diaper and containing a stone head declaring penises to be evil, but from what I've heard, it's a very well-shot movie that makes no sense whatsoever. "Black Moon" certainly fits that description as well. As Albert Walker put it in his recap of "Zardoz," a movie like this is frustrating because you can tell there's some intelligence, skill and talent behind the camera, but it doesn't matter because you can't tell what the hell is going on.

The story, or what there is of it: A woman named Lily is running away from something. There seems to be a war going on between men and women, but it only matters in a few scenes. (That's a real shame; I can imagine a really vicious satire of misogyny and rabid feminism in the idea of a war between men and women.) She eventually comes upon a house where she finds an old lady who can't or won't get out of bed, and her apparent children, a brother and a sister, who are both silent and named Lily.

That's just the plot. The film is full of images, many of them making no sense. Telling you some of the stuff that happens seems cheap, but I'll do it anyway: Naked kids appear and reappear frequently, usually leading around animals. The daughter of the old woman breast-feeds her, and later, the main character does the same. There's an extended sequence where the main character chases around a unicorn. At one point, she steps on some flowers, which wail in pain. That's right--wailing flowers. For a while, I thought that was a pun on Wayland Flowers.

The movie just keeps going through these weird images, one after another. As I mentioned before, it seems Louis Malle was trying to make a dream-like movie. If so, it doesn't seem to achieve a dream-like feel; it feels like they're trying to make it realistic. On reflection, it feels like a dream (especially in that "did-that-really-happen?" way), but it doesn't succeed while you're watching the movie.

Some people try to defend this movie somehow. They claim it's allegorical. The thing is, if it's an allegory, it's not clear what it's an allegory for. War? Growing up? Crazy glueing-gerbils-together? As Roger Ebert said, if you have to ask what it symbolized, it didn't. The idea of the movie being like a dream is slightly more apt, though it still doesn't answer many of the questions it brings up.

Don't think that I was miserable when I was watching it, though. I wasn't, really. It made me laugh a few times (certainly not the film's intention). In fact, if they hadn't been so clearly trying to make a dramatic art film, it could've been successful as a satire of artsy films and their pretentious meaninglessness. I was almost sad to have to delete it from my DVR; if I could've taped it, it would've made a great joke to play on people, or even better, a recap for the Agony Booth.

Indeed, the movie is almost crazy-lovable instead of crazy-annoying. How can you hate a movie where such random crap happens without the slightest explanation? Well, quite simply, it feels like they're not thinking about it. It's a waste of talent, but if you were forwarned that it was crazy and that you should view it as such, it would probably make for a fun, almost Monty Python-esque time.

This movie is not available on DVD. There may be a snowball's chance in hell that it would get some kind of release from the Criterion Collection (it even has the Janus Films logo before it). If they do release it, I can only wonder how they'll try to justify it on the back of the box.