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.