Litan (1982)

 

Director: Jean-Pierre Mocky

Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-Claude Romer, Patrick Granier, Scott Baker and Suzy Baker

Cast: Marie-José Nat as Nora; Jean-Pierre Mocky as Jock; Nino Ferrer as Le docteur Steve Julien; Marisa Muxen as Estelle Servais; Bill Dunn as Cornell; Georges Wod as Bohr

An Abstract Candidate / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Litan is a weird film, strangely difficult to see, considering it has the tone you can sell as equivalent to director/co-writer/star's Jean-Pierre Mocky fellow countryman Jean Rollin. They belong to an excursion into French horror before it become more prolific in the Millennium, and like each other, these are no conventional horror movies. Litan is definitely a surreal film with a capital "S", which will annoy some horror fans, but is a deeply strange one too yet full of violence and horror film tropes. There are even lashes of sci-fi and post apocalyptic mood that will abruptly go into a theory on where the souls of the dead go.

One person's chanting opens the film, which is striking for an initial scene, leads to Nora (Marie-José Nat) having a premonition of the events to transpire in a dream, a montage of out-of-context scenes from later in the film which are already bizarre in what they include. They include a masked marching band, dressed in red jackets with silver genderless masks, old man masked dancers, a coffin floating in a river, a motorbike on a tightrope stunt going amiss, and the gristly demise of her husband Jock (played by director Jean-Pierre Mocky). The town this is set in, Litan, is celebrating Litan's Day, a day of the dead celebrtion where contrary to my little knowledge of the film, my belief that the mentioned masked band were part of the main horror was wrong. They are merely among the many strange parts of the celebration before the real threat slowly rears its head. There are already snippets of something wrong, where you should not let a man clearly in a daze or half dead drive a van, leading to him running someone over, but with the town ignoring this as they celebrate. As Nora needs to get to the Black Rocks where her husband is working today, the mood is already off-kilter with parade musicians all wearing silver masks everywhere, everyone else in costumes and/or marks, and boy scouts chasing the "monster" as customary for Litan's Day, where one of their own has to dress up for the ritual and being persuaded.

With songbird sounds closer to squeaks in dog toys and whistles on the soundtrack, Litan is also "Art" with a capital "A", which will especially alienate some, but when the boy scout assigned as the monster, as Jock finds, is found unconscious in an underground cave at Black Rocks, Litan still has a genre plot, involving luminous blue worm creatures rendered with post-production lighting effect. Suggesting a body snatchers scenario, where the victims are left comatose in the hospital or drifting along, what actually is the case is that they cause the people to lose their selves, until the dead who are within these entities are occupying the town folk and returning back to the world, to relive their lives and their memories. The film is still unconventional, as alongside the fact one blue worm causes a body to disappear, even the world before these creatures make their appearances, within the water, is unsettling for a viewer, where the hospital has an entire room near the psychiatrist's wing where dogs get their vocal cords cut to stop barking. The film's logic is entirely dream-like though looking entirely grounded in eighties France, so not everything is quite right even for a standard interpretation on this premise.

As the blue worms leave people barely grasping where they are, already you have to content with a large man with a red right hand, who looks menacing, before you have the worms likely being responsible for a man claiming to be Yann, despite Yann already being dead. This is all within a macabre film which, for all its absurdities, has a sombre concept at its heart where the dead wish to return. When a psychiatrist, brought in for one of the comatose patients, decides to investigate, alongside his decision to try to resurrect a woman he loved, he ends up communicating with the dead and learning of the afterlife as interpreted here as a personal void you are stuck in. There is an entire discussion part of the way through from his perspective, to a police detective who says nubbins to anything supernatural, about his belief in God. When explosions caused by dynamite left from Jock's work at the caves transpire, causing the cemetery to split open and coffins to float in the nearest bodies of water, you also have the film steeped in the morbid as much as becoming more peculiar from then on, especially as soon after that event the town of Litan entirely descends into chaos.

Law is out the window by then, despite what that one detective thinks, becoming fixated on arresting Nora and Jock for a rational theory for the crimes he thinks they are behind. People lock themselves in their homes with shotguns, others rob the stores, and most people are left blank slates already having lost their original selves. There are aspects of Litan which are unintentionally ridiculous as a result, but the film does have a compelling air to it. The bizarre content before that second act already feels deliberate, such as the accident with the motorbike stunt which is ignored even if the driver has broken both his legs, whilst when the chaos transpires, the film manages to up the content to an even greater sense of delirium as a result. The Jean Rollin connection is apt as his cinema, whilst also horror, tapped into this type of mood of what is characterised as "fantastique", something Litan invites as a term to use as it intermingles horror, sci-fi and that which cannot be labelled together. A grounded version of France is another trait of these types of films, matter-of-fact in realistically depicting ordinary locations, in vast contrast to their content, unique in atmosphere as any Japanese horror film has been to set in normal locations. The setting, especially when it becomes both an ordinary town broken into chaos in the finale, but also a strange phantom town away from reality, becomes a huge virtue for Litan's tone as the plot progresses, escalating in its strange materials.

Litan, including its very idiosyncratic ending, [Spoiler Warning] where the community is stronger now everyone has multiple souls within them, meeting to worship God at a church [Spoilers End], is rewarding once its cavalcade of bizarre images and moments transpire. It is an odd film even in horror, but absolutely worth tracking down. Jean-Pierre Mocky, who was also a prolific actor, was very prolific as a film maker, but also one who worked in a variety of genres, from comedy to crime films, making Litan a fascinating excursion for him. For someone who worked with Jean-Luc Godard to Jean Cocteau in his career as an actor, his filmography as a director, which was prolific, is so unlike Litan in snippets you read of it, making the reward of this horror film more compelling when it was him taking a shot and managing his own idiosyncratic take on the genre with his collaborators.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium