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.