Bachanales Sexuelles

Bachanales Sexuelles

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Bachanales Sexuelles, an early 1970s movie from Jean Rollin. He directed this one under his ‘Michel Gentil’ pseudonym that he used for a lot of his porn films.

And this is a soft-core porno. Story involves a secret sex-cult ruled over by the tyrannical Malvine in an 18th-century chateau. Somebody from the cult has stolen pictures from Malvine and is publishing stories revealing the cult’s activities, and Malvine is determined to uncover the traitor and punish him. All she can glean from his publisher, however, is his address.

What Malvine doesn’t know yet is that the apartment in question is now inhabited by the nameless man’s niece Valerie. She got a message from her uncle saying he’d gone to New York for 6 months and asking her to apartment sit for him. But in the huge apartment, adorned with posters for Rollin’s famous vampire movies (maybe it was shot in Rollin’s own apartment?) Valerie feels nervous, so she invites her best pal Sophie to come share the bed with her. Of course a sex scene ensues.

Later that night two women in ninja outfits (one blue, one white) break into the apartment and abduct Sophie. Valerie is so drunk she sleeps through it, but Sophie manages to call her friend Frederic before she is taken. So here comes Fred, who suspects Sophie was playing a trick on him, so he gets in bed with her – only to find out that ‘Sophie’ is actually Valerie. (Of course, a sex scene follows.)

Meanwhile Sophie is dragged before Malvine in the chateau. She tries to tell them she’s not Valerie, but no good; Malvine orders her tortured. Of course the torments get a couple of the cult members excited, so they have to have sex.

Since Sophie won’t talk, Malvine sends Jenny to the apartment disguised as a maid to search out the photos that the mysterious traitor has stolen. Jenny runs into the real Valerie and Fred – of course a sex scene follows. Then the uncle’s real maid appears, and a French maid catfight ensues! At least they get the truth out of Jenny, that she is there for the photos, and the truth is that these photos are blackmail pix that Malvine uses to enforce her wicked will over her acolytes. Fred, who has by accident found the stash where the photo negatives are hidden, lets Jenny burn her incriminating pictures, and in turn Jenny gives them the address of the chateau.

Fred and Valerie go to the chateau. Meanwhile in the picture’s one true Rollin-scene, Malvine is out on the grounds shooting a pistol at some mannequins dressed as women and men, and finally addresses one female mannequin dressed as a man, calling it traitor, telling it she will unmask it at tonight’s ceremony, then fuck him before she murders him. She proceeds to kiss the dummy on the lips and shoot it in the crotch. Truly a demented, surreal scene that lacks only some weird colored lighting to rank in the Rollin hall of fame.

Some more shenanigans follow, and at last at the big orgy-ceremony, Valerie recognizes her uncle, Fred burns all the negatives, and the cultists all flee like vampires at daybreak, leaving only the uncle, a couple of sadist acolytes the uncle guns down, Fred, the twin ninjas, and Valerie and Sophie along with the newest adept. These last three run for their lives and sanity; Fred hangs around to make out with the twins (who also appeared in one of Rollin’s vampire movies he shot under his own name) and the uncle proceeds to do Malvine before, presumably, killing her.

Rollin at his best shows a poetical, surreal appreciation of setting and landscapes. He can make a Paris street look like a rundown street in a forsaken city on an alien planet, without any sort of budget. He loves colored light, and weirdness. He is famous for his vampire films, but how he came to make them is significant: he wanted to make surreal poetry films, but nobody would give him money for them. He did happen to know a couple of theater-chain owners who showed sex films at their theaters, so they said, ‘Put in some naked girls so we can show them at our theaters, and we’ll give you money for production.’ So was born La Vampire Nue his first feature, which he calls ‘the first French lesbian vampire movie,’ even though Roger Vadim had made Blood and Roses some years before. So he went on to do a series of vampire and horror movies with generous nudity, and got a famous French comic strip artist (Drouillet, I think) to draw posters, and those posters are glorious – they’re the reason I first became interested in Rollin’s movies.

Rollin had a gift for the striking image, the disturbing scene. His best films are like fairy tales from Jung. He likes things like circuses and the monsters of his infancy – the ghouls, werewolves, vampires, and so forth. His weakest point is always pace, which is always slow as grass growing. But part of the effect his films have lies in this slow, slow pace – it drives the audience to think deeply on what they see, and start creating scenarios on their own. You always see more in a Rollin film than he puts on the screen, in part because, bored to death, you are mentally trying to make a better story out of what he gives you. How can a man waste such great images on non-stories and nothing?

When Rollin lingers on an image, it does something to me. I find I have to ‘make sense’ of it somehow; I have to conjure up a reason why the image is onscreen so long. In part this comes from an assumption that the filmmaker is rational and does nothing without a valid artistic reason (as opposed to a practical or commercial reason – for example, a low-budget filmmaker might need to stretch every scene so as to meet acceptable feature length).

But it also comes from a phenomenon like the one we experience when we speak a word over and over again. The word loses its meaning and becomes a sound; the sound begins to strike us as strange, weird; eventually the sound itself suggests some other meaning.

Say a movie has a quick shot of a clock on the wall. Then it cuts back to the main action. OK, the cutaway tells us what time it is, and that’s the ‘reason why’ they put in the shot of the clock. But what if the shot of the clock stays onscreen for a long time? Well, it can’t be just to tell us what time it is, we figured that out already. So we start to look at the clock, what make it is, its details. We start to hear the ticking, if the clock ticks. We start to wonder about time itself. We watch the pendulum swing, or the second hand turn around.

Rollin didn’t just give us shots of clocks, he charged his images with religious and other iconography. There seems to be intrinsic meaning in those shots.

Here’s another reason why Rollin gave us so many lingering shots of things, and shots of landscapes. Rollin was dealing with taboo subject matter in most of his movies, and he had to be careful of the censors. If he couldn’t show directly what he wanted, he could show other parts of a scene (like the clock on the wall, an example I’m just making up here) while the soundtrack carries on. And if he gives us enough time on these innocuous, censor-save shots, he encourages us to imagine what is happening. So whether it’s sex, or sadism, or some violent act of a ghoul werewolf or vampire, the setting as mute witness to it all inspires us to create what could not be directly filmed. (This approach is doubly valuable in an age when different countries have different levels of tolerance and artistic liberty; it allows the local versions to be more or less coherent and of feature length.)

And yet one more reason Rollin would have liked these shots. Generally Rollin cast his female leads strictly by their looks. Did their look arouse, interest, intrigue Rollin? As a result, he hired a lot of women who couldn’t act; Rollin wasn’t much of an actors’ director in any event, and the low budget shooting he was condemned to obey meant quick setups and very few takes – if a shot was technically OK (and sometimes even if it wasn’t) then no retake was called for.

This means that the performances in Rollin’s movies were pretty much all dreadful. The best he could get out of his performers was a certain look, and to dress them in a certain way, and more or less ask them to move in a certain way. So in a Rollin movie, you don’t get a good conventional, classical drama ‘scene’ with lines of dialogue, speeches, and emotions. When he tries for such things, Rollin finds his cast just isn’t up to it, and there isn’t time to coach them and do retakes and full coverage.

Later on he drifted into softcore, then hardcore sex films, which are maybe a bit more honest, but in Bachanales Sexuelles at least, the lighting is not up to his usual standard. On the other hand the pace is somewhat better, as the sex scene gives him something to cover and cut, and us something to watch, and it’s a lot more detailed than he gets with his vampires.

It’s interesting to compare this sex film to his vampire films in other ways. The sex cult could easily be a vampire clutch, and Malvine rather than it’s ‘high priestess,’ might as well be the Vampire Queen of La Vampire Nue or his other vampire films. Fucking, or drinking blood, what’s the difference here?

One difference involves tension. In the vampire film, while the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the vampires to drink their blood … we can feel tension. Nothing is happening, but we know what’s going to happen, and we know the girls won’t like it. In the sex film the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the next sex scene with the next person to enter the apartment. But here we know the girls will like it, and so there is not a story-based tension. Instead the tension is more based in the audience, as we fret and wish for the film to get on with it and show us some goodies.

I’ve never seen any of Rollin’s hardcore that he did later in the 70s and into the 80s. I wonder if they are any better.

(21 March 2009)