‘Black Moon’: when Louis Malle homaged ‘Alice in Wonderland’ to disconcerting effect
Louis Malle is a director who defies easy categorisation. He remains a controversial filmmaker within the French New Wave movement because you can’t pinpoint a particular element from his films that could be coined to a specific personal style. Perhaps the only clear running thread throughout his work is the provocative and often political nature of his stories, but even then, he still has some films that are fairly whimsical and light-hearted, without obvious subtext.
After studying at film school and working on Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World in 1955, the director began creating his own work, from erotic thrillers, documentaries, war dramas and existentialist slow cinema. With films like Elevator to the Gallows, My Dinner with Andre and Murmur of the Heart, Malle showed a dexterous cinematic language that remains a mystery today. However, one of his lesser-known films from 1975 is perhaps the most puzzling and thematically rich from his body of work and strangely pays homage to one of the most famous children’s stories.
Black Moon is seen as the ‘film maudit’ from Malle’s filmography, which literally translates to a ‘cursed film’, being despised by many but fiercely defended by few. The film is described as an apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland set during a war between men and women, with one young girl escaping and discovering an alternate reality that is ruled by animals, and all people are androgynous and share her name.
It is full of surrealistic imagery, with naked children riding sheep, eagles being decapitated, and the main character breast-feeding an old woman. Malle combines this with minimal dialogue and a bleak colour palette that contradicts the vibrancy and peculiarity of the images, creating a nightmarish landscape from which you desperately want to escape.
However, unlike the original Alice in Wonderland, in which we can find enjoyment in the childish fantasies because we know there is little logic or meaning behind what is happening to Alice, there is a distinct undercurrent to Black Moon that points to a darker message. Scholars have debated the allegorical tone of the film and the underlying idea that it is a sexual coming-of-age story, with the main character experiencing a sexual awakening that is explored through the comparison of people with animals. Her desires and fears about sex are shown through the merging of animals and humans that blur the line between our differences and unite us through our primal instincts.
When discussing the film upon its release, Malle said, “The ultimate civil war . . . the war between men and women . . . the climax and great moment of women’s liberation”, which hints at how the central character is liberated through the explicit exploration of her fantasies, all shown through a heightened naturalism, with a subversive perspective of the power dynamics between men and women by painting everyone as a ‘creature’.
However, Malle’s feminist allegory is undercut by his interpretation of feminism in his other work, with Pretty Baby existing as an offensive and disgusting twist on female desire and sexual power, with the lead character being a 12-year-old who is coerced into being a sex worker, with Malle sexualising a child and painting it as a “testament to her beauty”.
But the attempt at this in Black Moon is nonetheless impressive and remains an interesting and divisive film that makes him one of the most versatile and unsettling filmmakers of the New Wave movement.
