LITAN - I'd only ever seen it once, years before, on a bootleg that might not even have carried English subs, but 'Litan', Jean-Pierre Mocky's whirling nightmare of a film, made such a pungent impression. I've waited ever since for some kind of aboveground release that did justice to the film's weird riches, and I thought all that was in vain, so obscure was the movie and its maker outside France. Leave it to Radiance to introduce both Mocky and his flagship horror moment to the high-street movie fan with their super three film box set - more on the rest of that in a moment. So 'Litan', how did it fare after all these years? It didn't blow me away like it did back then, but it's a vision of undeniable strangeness that feels as ungraspable as the mist that lines the crooked streets of its namesake, and whose dreamy evocation of the menace at the heart of a remote and squalid township seems destined to evoke the work of Lovecraft or Ligotti. It's about a woman who searches for her missing husband in Litan, a run-down burg in the throes of some kind of horrendous celebration involving widespread mask wearing. She runs from corner to corner surrounded by cavorting figures, her every step shadowed by sinister revellers in disguise, until her story intertwines with that of a researcher who wants to contact the dead. Back to those masks. They're everywhere in 'Litan' - it's like stepping into a painting by James Ensor, everyone's wearing one, making the whole movie feel a bit like an undulating crowd scene where all faces are covered. Skulls one moment, Venetian the next, then pigs. There's something frenetic about Litan's dark dreamworld, it's not meditative at all, everything's in constant motion, and poised to the point of appearing balletic... you're as prone to following the choreographed path of scampering urchins on the periphery than anyone or anything that might push the plot forward. That 'plot' feels like a mishmash of crazy arcs about hospital eruptions, bizarre experiments and glowing eel-things whose meaning and significance utterly escape me. But that's 'Litan' all over - not interested in appeasing expectations of common sense, more captivated by its own gauzy atmosphere of decrepit carnivalesque. Guaranteed to baffle as much as dazzle, and one for the surrealists out there.
KILL THE REFEREE - Another one from the Mocky box. I think 'Litan' was something of an outlier, not only for cinema in general but for the director too, as it seems that most of the rest of his work doesn't move in the direction of such dreamlike intensity. At first, 'Kill The Referee' seems down to earth - a faction of football fans squabbles inside a stadium, blaming the ref for a decision that spoils the match for them; meanwhile, their minds on other things, the referee and his journalist lover wring their hands and try to sort out their relationship. That all seems pretty grounded, but things take a dark turn with the death of one of the hooligans, and 'Kill The Referee' takes flight from reality in the form of a French-Soccer themed John Carpenteresque urban siege thriller! Nice idea but is it enough? With all that running around and chat I worried it might flag a little. I needn't have, because Mocky keeps things moving and always makes them nice to look at, his cinematographer giving Paris by night the mystery of a looming sepulchre. I guess the idea of thugs surrounded by Brutalist architecture was a nod to 'A Clockwork Orange', but the high rise they all end up in had the sterile grandeur of something out of Cronenberg or Ballard, and the film for me became more about the visual atmosphere of alienation than anything else. More perplexing and interesting stuff from the maverick Mocky.
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