Litan (1982)

Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare that may very well be a vision of the future in which her boyfriend, two-fisted – and very appropriately named - geologist Jock (director/co-writer/auteur Jean-Pierre Mocky), appears to die – among other, less straightforward things. This sends her racing for Jock through the streets of the curious little town of Litan, where they are temporarily living so he can do some rather explosive geological work.

Today is a particularly strange day in the already strange little town, for it is the festival of Litan’s Day, when its occupants roam the – often fog-shrouded – streets in masks, a (masked) brass band plays wherever and whenever, and everyone acts extra weird. I’d call it the Lesser Festival of Masks.

Apart from the already rather strange festival, there’s something stranger still coming, and soon, peculiar behaviour will turn obsessive or violent, the dead seemingly taking possession of the bodies of most of the living in town.

Sometimes, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s piece of fantastic (in the French sense of the “Fantastique”, so heighten your brows with me) cinema Litan can become a little too self-consciously weird for being surrealist’s sake for my tastes, channelling the misguided arthouse energy that brought us things like Fellini’s beloved parades.

Fortunately, that’s only happening in a couple of scenes, and for much of its running time, this is a wonderful exercise in dream moods and dream logic, taking place in a location where reality just doesn’t seem frayed at the edges but already half dissolved at the beginning of the film. Which would explain Nora’s actually prophetic dream rather well, if you want to apply some kind of story logic to a film that thrives as much on that of dream and metaphor as this one does.

Mocky creates the peculiar world of the film in often striking images that turn a very real location – most of the film was shot in an actual small town in the Auvergne that must be strikingly beautiful in its way – into a disorienting labyrinth where metaphors and symbols crash into elements of pulpy genre cinema in a way I have only ever encountered in French cinema. There is certainly a kinship to Jean Rollin here, while parts of the film play out as an outsider’s pick of elements of horror cinema from Romero’s Crazies – whose knitting lady would have felt right at home in Litan – to folk horror like The Wickerman, and the mad science and masks of Eyes without a Face. It’s just all filtered through a very individual, singular eye, as it should be.

Because this is a French movie, it is also rather discursive, so Mocky is certainly never hiding his ambition of speaking about capital letter concepts in capital letters. Love and Death, are the director’s main interests here, specifically, as well as the rather more complicated than we typically assume borders between Life and Death. The results of this discourse are rather ambiguous, but then, that is rather the point of film like Litan (possibly of life).