Black Moon
With Therese Giehse, Cathryn Harrison, Joe Dallesandro.
France/Italy/West Germany, 1975, 35mm, color, 100 min.
French with English subtitles.
After enjoying critical and commercial successes with Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien, Malle decided to go for something much more experimental and free-form. Always a great fan of myth and fantasy, and especially of the work of Lewis Carroll, Malle tries to create the special, charged atmosphere of a world in which actions, objects and creatures are never quite what they seem. The film begins when the teenaged Lily (Harrison) has a road accident and discovers she's landed smack in the middle of some kind of civil war. Fleeing into a nearby field, she comes upon a lonely mansion inhabited by an old lady (Giehse) who knows how to talk to animals. Shot by the great Sven Nykvist, Black Moon offers a distinctively different approach to the theme of adolescent self-realization that has been a frequent concern in Malle's work.
