In short: The Grapes of Death (1978)

Original title: Les raisins de la mort

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is on her way by – a nearly empty - train to reunite with her fiancée, who is working in a vineyard in the country. When she’s nearly there, she is attacked by a somewhat unhealthily and a bit rotten looking gentleman, who kills her best friend.

Élisabeth manages to escape the train and makes her way through a French countryside that has turned into a bit of a madhouse. People are infected with some sort of illness that turns them homicidally mad while their bodies slowly appear to decay. Well, that goes for the men at least, women seem to rot slower and go crazy in more interesting ways, because this is a Jean Rollin movie. Later, Élisabeth will learn that it’s all on account of a pesticide her own fiancée used on his grapes, but before she gets there, she will have various, often somewhat surreal and nightmarish, encounters with the mad, the sick and their victims.

Quite a few people seem to see The Grapes of Death as one of the films the great Jean Rollin made exclusively to get money for his more personal projects, but to my eyes, this is certainly no Zombie Lake nor like one of Rollin’s porn movies but the work of a director genuinely attempting to infuse the budding zombie apocalypse genre with his own sensibilities. For me, at least, Rollin does so quite successfully as well. In a couple of scenes, he’s grazing the more direct socio-political concerns you’d find in a Romero movie – and at least the bit with the infected wine is a satirical masterstroke – but mostly, he’s interested in what Rollin’s films are always interested in: Gothically romantic shots of landscape and buildings in decay he here finds in empty fields and a half-destroyed village and in some incredibly shots of the vineyard, where it always seems to be early November; violence that is broken and framed through a sense of the surreal; actresses with particularly expressive eyes, though you can’t always be sure what they express; an idea of madness that’s taken half from the literature of the macabre and half from what feels like a very personal place to me; and of course doomed (or undead) love.

In Grapes, Rollin fits all of this into a slowly – Élisabeth is on foot, after all – evolving picaresque of the macabre, a couple of moments of light gore, and at least one sequence (the burning village and a truly crazy Brigitte Lahaie performance) that feels like an authentic, if peculiar, nightmare, shooting everything with the eye of a painter of dream landscapes.

In short: Lost in New York (1989)

Original title: Perdues sans New York

An old woman tells of her childhood when she and a friend, reading a book of adventure tales, were dreaming themselves to be transformed into older bodies (Adeline and Funny Abitbol) by the Moon Goddess and transported to New York City. There, they find themselves separated, stepping through various places and times as well as moments from the sort of pulp and serial culture apparently beloved by all French people (and me). Irma Vep is suggested, and there’s of course a white (see-through) clad vampire too, as well as roses and graveyards.

For this is indeed a Jean Rollin movie, pretty much his final relevant film before his re-emergence at the end of the 90s. As will be typical of the late period movies, this isn’t really baby’s first Rollin movie, presenting as it does all of Rollin’s favourite moments and symbols in a way unvarnished even by the little plot he typically had use for. As such, this often feels a bit like an essay, or keeping with the film’s language as well as the obsessions of its filmmaker, a dream, about what a Rollin movie is, more than the thing itself. It is using a language quite a fewer viewers – especially those not already as madly in love with Rollin’s films as ideas and in practice as some of us are – are bound to find pretentious. I wouldn’t blame anyone for that. To me, however, it’s not pretentious if it is true and genuine, and there’s little I find truer than this distillation of Rollin’s main themes, obsessions and visual interests.

There are some new-ish elements on display here too, particularly the way Rollin shoots what should be an ultra-realistic slice of life of an actual city, but somehow still manages to give it the haze of a dream, treating the audience to a view on a thing that’s ultra-real yet still feels dream-like and peculiar.

All of this is obviously not for everyone, and if you’re planning on dipping a toe into Rollin’s ocean (neighbouring a dramatic coast with a castle ruin), you’ll probably want to do that with a different film first and return to this dream of New York, childhood wonders and aging, later.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampire (1973)

Because frankly, Rollin’s films do often lend themselves to scattered thoughts more than stringent analysis or a simple recounting of their plots. Though, to be fair, Frisson (known as Shiver of the Vampires in most English speaking markets), is actually one of the man’s more plot-heavy films, with an at least half-clear throughline and even some recognizable character motivations.

This is also the Rollin movie that show clearest that this strange low budget Romantic had a sense of humour. To wit, he provides us with two male vampires who are as goofy as they are weird, letting them give a couple long, word-play heavy double-monologues that connect vampirism to Isis as well as to the Black Madonna (it’s not as if “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” had invented this stuff) while Rollin uses the camera and the actors’ somewhat dubious performances in comically grotesque ways that not just lighten this heady (in the early 70s meaning of the word) business up considerably but also add to the Weird mood of the film instead of detracting from it.

This does of course fit nicely into one of Rollin’s greatest strengths, his ability to turn what should be his film’s greatest weaknesses into their greatest strengths. So, if not all of his actors and actresses can really act but absolutely have faces for the sort of things he’s doing he’s getting them to consciously increase their somewhat dazed and stiff demeanour until they act as if they were sleep-walking, which always seem to be an appropriate way to go through Rollin’s gothic dreamy and dream-like world of nude vampirism and (in this case) early 70s hipster vampires. Characters in Rollin’s films – certainly our male lead here – are so often not clear if they are dreaming or not, reacting in manners to the world Rollin creates that seem perfectly appropriate and downright realistic in context.


Which to me seems to be one of Rollin’s great achievements, making the borders between dream and reality inside of the particular dream world of his films so porous, diffuse and liminal, even a strict term like “realistic” can shift its meaning.

In short: The Iron Rose (1973)

Original title: La Rose de Fer

A man (Hugues Quester) and a woman (Françoise Pascal) meet cute at a wedding reception. He charms her with reciting poetry to the room, as you do. They have a rendezvous at the railway station of a country town, there’s biking, picnicking, and making out. On a lark, they enter a huge, decrepit graveyard to take a stroll and talk like French people in the movies talk. More making out follows, indeed, so much making out in a crypt, it suddenly turns dark on them while they’re otherwise occupied. Now they are lost in the graveyard, wandering around and reaching metaphorical and psychological extremes. More French movie talk is involved, too, of course.

With its total absence of vampires, La Rose de Fer was a bit of a change in the body of work of Jean Rollin at the time; though there is a random (perhaps allegorical) clown appearance, don’t you worry. It has never been one of my favourites in the singular director’s body of work, not because of the absence of vampires but because the film feels a lot more indulgent than most of Rollin’s other films to me. On an objective level, that’s probably not even true, for all of Rollin’s movies not made for a quick buck are perfectly self-indulgent and I do indeed love them for it. It’s just that Rollin indulges in exactly those parts of his work I find the least interesting here, particularly the poetic and philosophical dialogue that in the film at hand often seems too often would-be poetic and  would-be philosophical than anything else. But then, I also think that about the dialogue in the films of Eric Rohmer, and every Serious Film Critic just loves those as deep beyond measure, so perhaps I’m just not tuned into something specifically French here other writers are.


Be it as it may, this is not meant to say that La Rose isn’t worth seeing at all. There is many a lovely shot of the striking graveyard, by day and by night to gawk at, treated with Rollin’s customary eye for painterly composition on a budget, and sometimes, the film feels as if it were indeed teetering on the edge of some profound insight into the nature of life, death, or women and men. It’s just not as good and as convincing at drawing me in as most of Rollin’s other films are.

Lips of Blood (1975)

Original title: Lèvres de sang

At a party, Frédéric (Jean-Loup Philippe) lays eyes on a photo of a castle ruin by the sea. The picture is apparently meant to become part of some kind of ad campaign, though the film never explains for what exactly. The photo fascinates Frédéric, drawing out a childhood memory about a night he spent in these very same ruins protected by a strange, young, and very beautiful woman (Annie Belle). As we will later learn, recovering this memory is quite a remarkable thing, for Frédéric has no other memories of his childhood at all, and has constructed what he knows about this part of the past only from what his mother (Natalie Perrey) told him about it.

Not surprisingly, he becomes a bit obsessed with finding the place, the woman and perhaps an answer to questions about himself he can’t quite put into words. But it’s not easy finding out where exactly the castle is situated – the internet and Google image search still need to be invented, and someone puts quite some effort into making it impossible for him to find it, not even shying away from murder.

But Frédéric has protections too. Once he has remembered their encounter, the young woman appears to him as a shade, beckoning him into directions opportune to his quest. Thanks to her, Frédéric half-accidentally frees four young, female vampires with the thing for see-through gowns that flap, flatter and wave in the wind and no underwear all female vampires in Jean Rollin films have. These ladies will proceed to protect him quietly and mostly out of his sight in the only manner movie vampires know.

Ah, I love the films of Jean Rollin, and Lips of Blood is one of the very best of them. Yet Rollin’s films are, for me, rather difficult to write about, for their greatest qualities are not easily put into words unless one is a poet.

Sure, I can talk about the man’s unique aesthetic vision that includes a type of eroticism that might come from a fetishist place (or just from a man who knows what he finds beautiful) but seldom feels sleazy even when he’s showing vampire woman gowns revealing pretty much everything. Rollin mixes his erotic imagination with a healthy appreciation for the beauty of ruins, and has an eye that turns the nightly streets of Paris into a dreamscape as much as it does a castle ruin. Lips, belying the tiny budget typical of the director’s body of work, is a particularly beautiful film, full of shots that feel like strange paintings come to life, or as if someone had managed to not just film a dream but stage it wonderfully, too. In fact here Rollin works his magic so well, even a final scene in which the two surviving characters hop into a coffin, close it, and plan to let it drift to a lonely island to which they plan to lure rich sailors and drink their blood, doesn’t seem ridiculous but completely in tune with the logic of dream and childhood memory the rest of the film displays.


If one wants, one can of course read the whole affair as a metaphorical treatment of Frédéric’s midlife crisis and his wish to regress back into a mythical youth. I do think that reading works of art, even more so of art as outside of the mainstream as Rollin’s, as puzzles to solve to come to a very specific reading and meaning (which as it happens also tends to be one from which we can then moralize and berate an artist for their numerous moral failings), is a terribly reductive way of going about things, not just eschewing the qualities of mystery and ambiguity, but also turning an imaginative place we can inhabit into a mere map of the place.