BLACK MOON on Flix

Cathryn Harrison and Joe Dallesandro.

Glumly channel surfing after WHAT'S MY LINE? last night, my eyes suddenly thrust forward as I sat bolt upright: Louis Malle's rarely seen BLACK MOON (1975) was running on Flix! This is a film I've wanted to see ever since I first read about it in CINEFANTASTIQUE thirty or more years ago, but I've never had the chance till now. Unfortunately I'd missed the first half hour, but unable to find another showtime scheduled on my Dish Network channel grid, I bit the bullet and decided to settle in and watch the remaining hour and some. This is hard for me to do, because I've adopted a Woody Allen-like rule against seriously watching any movie that has already started, and half-an-hour is quite a bit started. I was only able to break my rule because I feared this might be my only chance to see any part of this elusive gem. (Is it really possible that I once collected 16mm odd reels?)

I don't understand why the film is so disliked. True, it's not a mainstream feature, but it's a wonderful, creative use of the medium and made with undeniable and often inspired artistry. From what I could gather, BLACK MOON is a kind of ALICE IN WONDERLAND story starring Cathryn Harrison (the stunning 16 year-old daughter of Noel Harrison, looking like the feral kid sister of Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorleac) as a young woman who emerges from a car accident into a feature-length dream experience. It takes her to a secluded cottage where she finds naked children chasing an enormous pig, twin siblings (Joe Dallesandro and Alexandra Stewart) intent on killing each other and various animals, and a bedridden old woman who has the ability to communicate with animals (like Cathryn's grandfather Rex!) and makes a smecking sound that periodically alerts the two women in the picture that it's time to bare their breasts and feed her.

Viewers desperately clinging to terra firma will likely have problems navigating this misty mountain fantasmagoria, but the quality of the cinematography alone (by Sven Nykvist) should be enough to keep most film buffs watching, narrative be damned. I was fascinated from the get-go, but as the crazy scenes and incidents accumulated, I began to love the film for its sheer anarchistic invention and humor. I laughed a lot, but most of the time my eyes sparkled in admiration. Some incredible images on view: the absurdly huge rat (almost a baby kangaroo) on the old lady's ham radio... the eagle that comes flying in through the open window, fulfilling the promise of a faded painting on the wall ... the obese unicorn... the scene of Cathryn lifting the old lady out of bed and carrying her around like a rag doll with wasted limbs, while singing to her... Oh, to have witnessed the effect this movie must have had on the stoned-out midnight movie audiences of its day!

Possibly it's not great Malle, but it's great something. For some reason, as I was watching it, I had the idea stuck in my mind that it was a Polanski film rather than a Malle one. I can only tell you that -- what with the black humor, the milk imagery, the dead sheep in the larder, and of course, the splendidly coltish jailbait heroine -- it works as a Polanski film extremely well, perhaps better than it works as a film by Louis Malle. Younger viewers than myself will likely think first of David Lynch as a frame of reference, and it's not unlike the kind of film Lynch would make if he was more of a country boy and less attracted to dark and infernal forces. Despite its tenebrous title, BLACK MOON has surprisingly bright bearing for a weird-out.

BLACK MOON will be showing a few more times on Flix this month (on June 25 at 3:45 am eastern, and on June 25 at 11:35 pm eastern), and on Showtime Beyond next month, so mark your desktop calendars as I have done. Internet searches reveal that it is also being released on DVD in Australia in July, but the Flix master is lovely and windowboxed at 1.66:1 -- very likely a more generous framing than will appear on the official release.