Lost in New York (1989)

directed by Jean Rollin
France
52 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I don't know a lot about Jean Rollin and I never really cared to watch his stuff, but I feel like I should because there seems to be a consensus among people who watch his movies that there's something else about them, something that goes deeper than the average Eurotrash flick would think about. I figured Lost in New York could be a good introduction to his work for me seeing as it's described as his "most personal" and is also very short.

It's easy to see that this is a pretty personal film because of the way it heavily deals with nostalgia and friendship, although the latter of those things is maybe not explored very deeply. It's about two little girls in an undisclosed time period who discover that they can transport themselves within the pages of storybooks with the help of an ancient(ish?) wooden idol of a "moon goddess". They can also transport themselves to New York, for some reason. I guess to two children, New York might seem as much a faraway fantasy-land as what they read about in books.

The deeper meaning of this appears to be that the girls are not only connecting with random stories through this moon goddess idol, but with the whole of womanhood/femininity (I don't particularly wish to equate the two, but this movie certainly seems to) as if it's one solid continuum that any woman can tap into. All minds of women are one, all stories about women are ultimately about one persona, one single All-Mother that contains multitudes: transcendent womanhood. It's not explicitly mentioned in the film that this is what's going on, but it's very obvious that the concept of a continuum of womanhood is the ultimate background for this story.

It's also worth mentioning that this doesn't delve into what truly makes up the experience of womanhood and the fact that for every single woman and woman-aligned person on Earth, that experience is vastly different and occasionally (in fact very often) is a massively oppressive thing. We don't get any deconstructions of forced femininity here, this is not a film aiming to produce social awareness or critique oppressive concepts. This is an almost airy-fairy meditation on the concept of We Are All One™ with a bit of flashy sexuality and generic "earth goddess" business. I appreciate it as a movie and I think it has several layers to it that I am probably not going to be able to unpack, but its message doesn't feel revolutionary or beneficial to women- which, granted, it doesn't have to be, because it's fun anyway.