Alas Alice

By J.C.

BLACK MOON Directed by LOUIS MALLE Screenplay by LOUIS MALLE, GHISLAIN UHRY and JOYCE BUNUEL

A young girl (Cathryn Harrison), blonde, British, with the premature and slightly tentative poise of adolescence, drives down a highway through deserted countryside. In the distance, there is the sound of artillery.

Soon after, her small orange car is stopped by an army unit. Men in camouflage suits are lining up women, dressed, similarly, as soldiers. The men slaughter the women with machine-gun fire. The young girl drives wildly off the road and across country.

She comes, eventually, to a large, isolated house. There is food cooking and, over in the corner, a pig seems to be talking to her. This is not entirely surprising. Moments before, the girl had seen a unicorn in the garden.

Across the kitchen table, almost out of reach, is a large glass of milk that the girl can hardly hold. Upstairs, there is an old woman (Theresa Giehse), an invalid who tells the girl. "You have a very vivid imagination." After a while the old woman dies, but is brought back to life by a young man (Joe Dallesandro) who holds a mirror in front of her face. Observing all this, the young girl mentions in passing that "all is illusion."

Dream Pastiche. The thought is small comfort, and less justification. Louis Malle, director of Lacombe, Lucien and The Fire Within, is attempting in Black Moon some manner of dream pastiche, a symbolic fantasy of adolescence. The movie is like the ragged end of a halfhearted parlor game played by Freud and Lewis Carroll on a slow summer evening. The young girl's appearance and her slightly prissy ingenuousness come from the Alice books. So do the controlled flights of strangeness. Carroll's wit is lacking, however, and his sense of wonder.

Black Moon has the clinical, slightly oppressive tone of dream data being recorded and examined. Freudian symbolism proliferates. The war between the sexes suggests the girl's adolescent turmoil over her own sexual identity. One notes--one can hardly avoid--the preponderance of traditional Freudian sexual metaphors: snakes, clocks, the horn of the unicorn. Add to this the curdled maternalism of the old invalid and the nearly unreachable sustenance of that outsize glass of milk, and Black Moon seems like a long case study.

That is just the trouble. The movie (lovingly shot in autumnal tones by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer) is a clutter of notes and notions. The elaborate panoply of symbolism is never transcended, and the young girl herself remains undiscovered. If Malle had hoped to reveal her by uncovering her fantasies, he has only further obscured her, made her a prisoner of her own dream.

J.C.

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