Litan (1982)

directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky
France
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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After having searched for somewhere to watch this for ages, it's different than I expected: I thought of something more rural, but this is too hectic to be bucolic, or to be much of anything other than oneiric and slightly distressing. The plot is anybody's guess, but it revolves around a woman and a man trying to evade certain death in a town inhabited by people with a drive to either put themselves in grave danger or injure others with reckless abandon. It's established that much of what happens during this film was foreseen by the main character during a dream just prior to the beginning of the movie, but of course nobody believes her because if you ask people in a dream if they're in a dream, they'll usually try to deny it, or at least that's been my experience, anyway. Whether or not this movie actually takes place in a dream is left open to interpretation.

The subtle hints of surrealism couched in more overt surrealism are a driving force here. We see several characters along the way who we never get to know the backstories of; like a cross-eyed man who pines for an undisclosed past life, a babushka-looking woman speaking a dialect different from all the other characters, musicians in skull masks, non-musicians in skull masks, the living dead, a guy who looks like Willem Dafoe and Peter Cushing had a baby whose second cousin is Robin Wright, and more. These people are encountered again and again, but the influence they have on the main character is either negligible or unclear. I guess you could argue that everything in the town is acting in sync to harass the main character and her companion- that the people are all only facets of a larger dream/nightmare who fit together like puzzle pieces.

Many people are in masks, doing strange, non-everyday activities, and supposedly this is because the protagonist and her travelling companion ended up in the town on "Litan's Day"- a holiday which Google provides no clues as to the existence/non-existence of- but this explanation seems feeble to me. It looks more like this is always how the town is, or at least that it's always how the town is beneath the surface, and on this day the true nature of the townspeople is allowed to be let loose. Everybody dresses up like death so nobody can figure out who the real Death is. This motif is represented by the overwhelming presence of the color red in almost every scene. Death could be everywhere- it is everywhere- but the layperson still can't tell where it is.

This whole thing is structured almost exactly like a dream in that it doesn't have a clear beginning or end and the main character seems to always be running from one place to the next with no goal in mind. Here is there, scene lays over scene so that many things can happen at exactly the same time. Narrative magic. Where the asylum ends and the rest of the village begins is not clear. Possibly the whole of the village is inside the asylum. The water is to be avoided. Possible better in concept than execution, but a good one for fans of Jean Rollin or some of Louis Malle's work.