atlasmb At the beginning of "Black Moon" we see a young woman (Cathryn Harrison) trying to negotiate a war-torn countryside in a car. The conflict appears to be between men and women. She evades the male army by driving through fields until she arrives at a country manor occupied by a strange, older woman and various other people and animals.The story is surreal, filled with non sequiturs and obtuse symbolism. I call it symbolism, because it feels like it has an underlying meaning, but I am not sure; there are few clues to any messages within the action. Like a poem, one is free to impose his own understanding upon the piece. It feels like a variation on "Alice in Wonderland" as designed by Salvador Dali.In my best interpretation of this film, it is a dream of the girl's. We witness her unconscious mind's interpretation of the social and political "battle between the sexes", along with representations of her budding sexuality. Beyond that, I don't feel compelled to analyze the symbolism behind the images.I don't find the wandering storyline particularly interesting. The images themselves can sometimes be interesting. The director, Louis Malle, has created some images that might stay with the viewer, if only because they are singularly unique, e.g. the small, unicorn that sits while talking with the girl. On an emotional level, I feel that the film fails. Though the girl, and others, display emotions, I never felt invested in their stories. I was left with no emotional impact. And no social or political message.

tom245-32-153383 this...film...was...weird. I was working my way down a "weirdest films" list when I got to this one. After seeing the trailer (the one where the badger gets run over by a car), I decided to watch. was this a good idea... I don't even know. What on earth did I watch? It's like a surrealist Bunuel movie, but more empty, with bad acting and literally nothing making sense. After watching this, I found out it was a Malle film, which I was very surprised at. Here is a conversation I found with Billy Wilder and Louis Malle: "Allegedly, the story goes like this. Billy Wilder runs into Louis Malle, this is in the late 50′s, early 60′s. And Louis Malle had just made his most expensive film, which has cost 2 1/2 million dollars. And Billy Wilder asks him what the film is about. And Louis Malle says "Well, it's sort of a dream within a dream." And Billy Wilder says "You just lost 2 1/2 million dollars" Apparently there are deep meanings to the images shown on film, but all I see is a random mess.

D-Mon OK, now this has got to be one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen.Bottom line: there is NO storyline at all. The movie starts with a young woman fleeing from soldiers who apparently want her dead. So far so good you might think. Well, maybe not for that poor girl, but at least you start identifying with her and you still have the idea that this will lead somewhere and that eventually, you will be granted complete and total illumination. Trust me, you will not. She ends up in a farmhouse and from this point on, things get quite fuzzy for my brain. You probably should be under the influence of some kind of substance to make any sense of it all: all figures other than the young woman seem to appear and disappear at random. Animals can talk (if you take LSD they might), twisted acts are being performed and there's an annoying old lady who must have escaped from a nut-house.If you try, you probably can attach a deep meaning to what you are seeing, but as for me, I just can't see it you know, being sober and all... It almost seems like an attempt to visualize a bad dream. The kind of dream where you desperately want to awake from, realizing it wasn't real. The movie is real. Avoid it, unless you have a pharmacy or a liquor-store nearby.

MARIO GAUCI I had missed out on this on French TV a few years ago – the film is so obscure that I had never even heard of it back then!; eventually, I caught up with it while in Hollywood on bootleg DVD-R in an English-dubbed version (as was this current edition, albeit a slightly out-of-synch one!).Best described as a plot less apocalyptic surreal fantasy on "Alice In Wonderland" lines, it actually precedes Claude Chabrol's own superior modernized take on the children's classic (ALICE, OR THE LAST ESCAPADE [1977]). For the record, writer-director Malle had previously only breached fancy with the anarchic ZAZIE DANS LE METRO (1960) and, with Luis Bunuel's daughter-in-law Joyce contributing to his script here, it could well be that the use in the film under review of Wagner's music – also heard in the elder Bunuel's L'AGE D'OR (1930) and WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1954) – was a deliberate nod in his direction. The leading lady of BLACK MOON is a beguiling Cathryn Harrison, granddaughter of Rex; also in the cast are Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dalessandro as incestuous siblings (neither of whom ever utter a single word, though he likes to express himself in baritone!).The film's war-torn landscape is undercut by a plethora of entomological detail, beginning with a raccoon getting crushed under the heroine's car's wheels and ending with a snake slithering up her skirt!; there is also a giant rodent – with which the eccentric old lady of the central setting, a dilapidated country-house, frequently engages in gibberish conversation (for whatever reason, she also keeps a control center by her bedside!) – and a squat talking brown unicorn, which seems to particularly intrigue Harrison!!The elderly woman – who died before the picture was released (in fact, it is dedicated to her memory) – occasionally takes the semblance of death even here and, when she comes to again, finds herself craving milk: Stewart and, eventually, Harrison oblige her in this regard – the film, then, ends on a shot of the heroine about to feed the afore-mentioned horse in the very same manner! Harrison, too, seems fond of milk – which she repeatedly drinks out of a very tall glass set at table, always with a pig nonchalantly looking on!; besides, a brood of wild naked children are continually seen chasing a hog all over the place.In the end, the film proves too obscure and personal for complete success and, yet, it is certainly not to be ignored by way of its intrinsic strangeness and undeniably haunting quality.