The interesting thing about Louis Malle is that he is often lumped with the new waveleteers primarily because he shot a feature - Lift To The Scaffold in English - on location shortly after Godard's Brainless and Truffaut's The 400 Yawns, when in fact he has always (or so I thought) made more or less mainstream films. With Black Moon the Academic-Psued axis may well be justified in labeling him with something trendy like post-New Wave because Black Moon is a genre-defying one-off and it meets the principal criterion of Academia in that it can be about ANYTHING they want it to be which means they can 'teach' it til the cows come home offering a different interpretation each semester. For the rest of us mere mortals we can either take it or leave it. We not first the depressing colour and equally depressing landscape, a suggestion of late Autumn of even full Winter negated by the gamboling/frolicking of totally naked children. The protagonist - if that's not overstating it - is clearly old enough to drive, i.e. late teens, who can get away with early twenties yet is also perversely childlike. In rapid succession she encounters 1)armed militia who mow down a group of innocent civilians, 2) a group of naked children playing with a pig, 3) an apparently bed-ridden old woman who talks into a wireless set via a microphone and 4) a unicorn - grey-black rather than pure white - with whom she is able to converse. We are free to make of this what we will. Multiplex fodder it's not. intriguing? This depends entirely on your own point of view. Mesmerising? See above. Watchable? Yes.
Review of Black Moon
