Micitype Pretty Good

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

morrison-dylan-fan Whilst a fan of his magnificent French New Wave Film Noir Lift to the Scaffold, I for some reason have never got round to seeing the other creations by auteur Louis Malle. Talking to a DVD seller,I found out he had recently tracked down an off-beat sounding title by Malle,which led to me looking up to the sky for the dark moon.View on the film:Playing out the first 15 minutes with muffled radio noise being the lone dialogue, the screenplay by Louis Malle & Joyce Buñuel, (she would soon divorce her then-husband Juan Luis Buñuel) give the dialogue a clipped,fairy tale-style presentation, via the characters being limited to first names or descriptions, ("The Old Lady") and the murmurs of a literal battle of the sexes encourages Lilly to crawl deeper into the dream-scape of the house. Taking soil from the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,the writers spin Alice's fantasy adventure into a more surrealist direction with the random running around of naked children, (thankfully without Carroll's signs of paedophile) the breastfeeding of the old lady and a unicorn (!),and fellow guests at the house disappearing into air drawing out Lilly's fantasy of childhood,into the snake of adulthood.Retaining his independent French New Wave spirit by shooting the entire film on his own 200-year-old manor house and its surrounding 225-acre, director Malle and cinematographer Sven Nykvist take advantage of the limitations by giving Lilly's adventures a closed-off appearance,where every attempt she makes to leave, leads Lilly back to the house. Making everyone else round the house fade-out like ghosts,Malle gathers snippets of reality with close-ups held in silence glimpsing at the reality Lilly is leaving.Beautifully using forced perspective to keep Lilly at a child's height, Malle wraps the surrealism in a grotesque,oddly enchanting oder, with the unicorn and birds being given a rotting appearance, and the Old Lady/mother stand-in only being able to survive thanks to breast milk. Sipping on her last performance, Therese Giehse casts a great, unsettling mood as the Old Lady,whose mumbled words Giehse uses to keep Lilly permanently unsettled. Dreaming to escape from the unfolding battle of the sexes,Cathryn Harrison elegantly threads Lilly's child sense of wonder with a sensitive maturity that glows as the black moon rises.

Aditya Gokhale A lot of avant-garde filmmakers experimented with Lewis Carroll's classic novel "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Some features that come to mind are Jaromil Jires' wonderful film, "Valerie and her Week of Wonders", Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" and Jan Svankmajer's "Alice". Louis Malle's surrealist experimental film "Black Moon" could very well fit into this category of the directors' own interpretation of the novel giving it their own "free form"! Written by Louis Malle in collaboration with Joyce Bunuel (Luis Bunuel's daughter-in-law!) and directed by Louis Malle, "Black Moon" is devoid of any central plot as such. Set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop of a "war between the sexes", this film simply chronicles the weird happenings as experienced (or imagined?) by a teenage girl, Lily (Cathryn Harrison) who has narrowly escaped being killed by men seemingly out to wipe out the entire women populace! Having been lucky to have escaped, she just speeds away in her car deep into the woods only to come across an isolated property, a huge manor house and its strange inhabitants. The house is dwelled in by a cantankerous, bed ridden old lady (Therese Giehse) with a weird fetish, who talks to animals, especially a big rat-like creature "Humphrey" in some language that's gibberish, and every once in a while speaks on a radio kept by her bed. There is a brother-sister pair around the house to take care of stuff. They don't speak a single word. They only hum some songs as they work around the property. Some snakes tucked away in unlocked drawers also share the space with them! The most bizarre of all though, is the presence of about half a dozen naked children running around playing with a gigantic pig; they keep interrupting Lily's path every time she chases a not-so-graceful Unicorn that seems to be a regular visitor around the property…..Everything sounds very interesting for film lovers who love their films rife with surreal dreamscapes but frankly it doesn't go much beyond this. The film surely holds our interest for most of its modest running time of about 95 minutes thanks to the splendid camera-work by the genius cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the rather awe-inspiring sound design. In a fabulous close-up of a crawling centipede, you can actually "hear" the little thing crawl on a surface! In another hilarious scene (repeated twice), amidst near dead silence, a pig sitting at a table, apparently guarding a large glass of milk kept at the center of the table, lets out a loud grunt every time Lily gulps milk from it! These are just some of the really jaw-droppingly outlandish scenes in the film and there are a good number of them. There are some scenarios that are so absurd, they are comical and that's a good thing, but after a while the same devices are recycled instead of bringing in some novelty factor. Once one gives in to the idea of absurdist fiction, then there are no limits to what one can do! But surrealism not being Malle's forte, he leaves a little to be desired in his product. If a premise that automatically creates endless possibilities starts to get repetitive then there is a problem somewhere! Malle even tries to infuse some allegorical allusions to the Indian epic Ramayana (a particular episode involving "Jatayu", the demi-god possessing the form of a vulture, who tries to save Sita from Raavana's clutches!) but it doesn't necessarily create a huge impact in the overall proceedings.This is an English language film and Cathryn Harrison, portraying Lily clearly speaks in English. However Therese Giehse's (Old Lady) speech sounds dubbed in English and her lip movement is ridiculously out of sync. It is unclear whether this was intentional or a technical glitch, a bad dubbing job or a bad lip-synching job! At times even Harrison's dialog seems out of sync. Some of it sounds really dumb as well! If one thinks from a certain angle, there certainly is an interpretation that gives the happenings on screen some meaning and a vaguely fitting explanation which could even reflect religious themes! I would not like to adhere to any theory or interpretation though. I think it is safe to assume that Louis Malle didn't want to make a deeply thought-provoking or metaphorical film. He merely wanted to compile some dream-like visions into a motion picture laced with themes of civil war and futuristic dystopia and a teenager's coming-of-age, and that's fair enough. He wanted his film to be more a visual experience than a cerebral puzzle. Only Luis Bunuel or David Lynch could've done a much better job with the material at hand.Score: 7.5/10.

Martin Teller Another Louis Malle film that's not much like any other Louie Malle film. A kind of Carroll-esque dreamworld where a young lady flees from a literal war of the sexes and takes refuge in a farmhouse with three strange inhabitants, a flock of naked children and numerous animals. The movie is light on dialogue (the most significant conversation includes a unicorn) but heavy on surrealist, symbolic imagery. And it's a big borefest. I have no objection to non-narrative films, but something has to hook me. Otherwise it's like someone describing his dreams to you -- dreadfully dull. The few intriguing elements of the film aren't even worth mentioning, the rest is an exercise in sexually-charged non sequitur. The photography by Sven Nykvist is nice, too bad it's not in the service of more engaging (or less annoying) material.

starrbaby82680 This movie is one of a kind. It was so weird I couldn't stop watching it. If you like strange and unusual movies like I do, then watch this one. You won't be disappointed. I've seen it 3 times so far and I still never ever get bored with it. I can only imagine what the writer was smoking when he wrote this story. It's one of those movies that stays with you forever. It makes no sense whatsoever, but, you can't stop watching it. For those of you who have never heard of it or seen it, you should definitely give it a whirl. You might have to watch it 2 or 3 times like I did, to try and understand what the hell is going on. Good luck and enjoy.