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This review contains mild spoilers.
There’s something quite poignant about the way Jean Rollin depicts characters with disabilities or mental illness. I think of the blind woman from The Grapes of Death or certain characters in The Night of the Hunted, and while the portrayals may not be up to the standards of real life accuracy or political correctness (I alluded in my review of Wait Until Dark to some occasional uneasiness I’ve had around how movies use disabilities in their storytelling), I think Rollin is able to depict these characters with a great deal of sensitivity. I think a large part of the credit goes to the actresses, who bring a certain dignity to their roles, so that they don’t just feel defined by their disabilities or mental illness, even if those conditions play into the plot. The lead characters are two girls who escape from a mental institution, go off to live with a traveling troupe of entertainers, and when they’re about to get busted by the police, sneak away with a kindly pickpocket with dreams of sailing away to a distant land. When we meet them, one of the girls is practically catatonic and the other is more prickly, but over the course of the movie, we see them both evolve, the former opening up and the latter becoming warmer and more nurturing.
I think a large part of why their arcs are so affecting is the experiential quality Rollin imbues into key sequences. There’s a pretty beautiful figure skating sequence (undeniably the movie’s highlight) where you can see the thrill and joy the character gets from the activity. Or look at the scene where the characters enter a bar, one of them likely for the first time in her life, and the way the movie captures the excitement of entering a lively new location. This feels in obvious ways like Rollin’s other movies, with a similarly delicate touch to the direction, and that half-awake atmosphere that doesn’t quite feel dreamlike. But here, stripped largely of genre elements (no vampires, not much bloodletting, not even much nudity), it ekes out a certain poetry by juxtaposing these essentially innocent heroines with their hardscrabble existence and unforgiving surroundings. There is temporary solace found as the characters take up with makeshift families of kindly outsiders, but that is shortlived.
Things go south when the girls fall into the orbit of a quartet of swingers (the great Brigitte Lahaie among them, lighting up the screen as she always does). One of the men shows off his collection of antique guns to one of the girls, while the two women invite the other girl into their softcore coupling. And here you see Rollin reintroducing those genre elements, but with a sinister edge. The stuff that arguably adds enjoyment to his other movies merits suspicion in this context. It reminds me of the way Gerard Damiano ends Skin Flicks on a particularly ugly scene, as if decrying the triumph of exploitation over art, and while I’m not as well versed in Rollin’s motivations, I wonder if he had similar feelings about his filmmaking. What I do know is that I had grown to care for the heroines quite a bit, and when the film ended in tragedy, I was quite moved.
The Escapees (Rollin, 1981)
This review contains mild spoilers.
There’s something quite poignant about the way Jean Rollin depicts characters with disabilities or mental illness. I think of the blind woman from The Grapes of Death or certain characters in The Night of the Hunted, and while the portrayals may not be up to the standards of real life accuracy or political correctness (I alluded in my review of Wait Until Dark to some occasional uneasiness I’ve had around how movies use disabilities in their storytelling), I think Rollin is able to depict these characters with a great deal of sensitivity. I think a large part of the credit goes to the actresses, who bring a certain dignity to their roles, so that they don’t just feel defined by their disabilities or mental illness, even if those conditions play into the plot. The lead characters are two girls who escape from a mental institution, go off to live with a traveling troupe of entertainers, and when they’re about to get busted by the police, sneak away with a kindly pickpocket with dreams of sailing away to a distant land. When we meet them, one of the girls is practically catatonic and the other is more prickly, but over the course of the movie, we see them both evolve, the former opening up and the latter becoming warmer and more nurturing.
I think a large part of why their arcs are so affecting is the experiential quality Rollin imbues into key sequences. There’s a pretty beautiful figure skating sequence (undeniably the movie’s highlight) where you can see the thrill and joy the character gets from the activity. Or look at the scene where the characters enter a bar, one of them likely for the first time in her life, and the way the movie captures the excitement of entering a lively new location. This feels in obvious ways like Rollin’s other movies, with a similarly delicate touch to the direction, and that half-awake atmosphere that doesn’t quite feel dreamlike. But here, stripped largely of genre elements (no vampires, not much bloodletting, not even much nudity), it ekes out a certain poetry by juxtaposing these essentially innocent heroines with their hardscrabble existence and unforgiving surroundings. There is temporary solace found as the characters take up with makeshift families of kindly outsiders, but that is shortlived.
Things go south when the girls fall into the orbit of a quartet of swingers (the great Brigitte Lahaie among them, lighting up the screen as she always does). One of the men shows off his collection of antique guns to one of the girls, while the two women invite the other girl into their softcore coupling. And here you see Rollin reintroducing those genre elements, but with a sinister edge. The stuff that arguably adds enjoyment to his other movies merits suspicion in this context. It reminds me of the way Gerard Damiano ends Skin Flicks on a particularly ugly scene, as if decrying the triumph of exploitation over art, and while I’m not as well versed in Rollin’s motivations, I wonder if he had similar feelings about his filmmaking. What I do know is that I had grown to care for the heroines quite a bit, and when the film ended in tragedy, I was quite moved.