Jean Rollin | Fascination / 1979

blood of an ox

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Rollin (screenwriter and director) Fascination / 1979

 

The films of Jean Rollin are an acquired taste that is particularly difficult for a cis gay man such as myself who doesn’t much like gore, vampire movies, or watching beautiful women engage in tasteful Sapphic sex. And although I do not necessarily demand heavy “action” in my films, neither do I appreciate characters wandering aimlessly around for an hour and twenty minutes, between scenes of soft porno, quick and unexpected violence, and images of women dipping their faces into human blood.

     Yet Rollins’ films are also, at moments, stunningly beautiful, almost artworks as they slowly shift, like the old and now lost photographic slides projected across screens, images in search of a narrative. The narrative one discovers, moreover, vaguely encompasses all sorts of interesting subjects, from issues of class struggle to confrontations between totally emancipated women facing off with men who believe at all times they are in control, able through their patriarchal rights to control a situation, only at the last moment realizing they have been permitted only in mockery and jest. Rollin’s films play out a bit like Sadeian philosophical texts as rewritten by women. And these are pleasures I can hardly resist.

 

     His 1979 film, Fascination, is perhaps one of the most revelatory of his works in this regard. The movie begins by combining both its central issues, a group of privileged aristocratic women dressed in white gowns and black capes, herded by their husbands into a slaughterhouse, with innards and blood strewn across the floor, as they are requested to drink glasses of ox-blood to as therapy for what the male doctors declare is female anemia. The year is 1905 and the country France, caught photographically in a belle-epoque moment we’ve never quite before imagined visiting, delicacy, grace, and beauty performed in the confines of an abattoir. This scene alone, with its numerous contradictions and social and political implications, is as surreal—the word often used in relation to Rollin’s images—as anything that might follow.

     Such absurd rituals and beliefs most naturally lead to equally absurd results—which Rollin stole evidently from a short tale title “Le Verre de sang” by Jean Lorrain—as over time the women gradually grow addicted to the blood, and quietly form their female cult in celebration of the blood-drinking activity, transforming it into a blood-letting event as well.

     Meanwhile, nearby in the wilds a group of individuals of a much different socio-economic level, brutal thieves, demand that their leader Marc (Jean-Pierre Lemaire) immediately share the golden ducats they have robbed. He insists that they will be worthless without transferring them into regular cash, and is planning to meet with a customer for the ducats in London. Rightfully, his fellow thieves don’t trust him and attempt to take the small briefcase from him, he, in reaction, kidnapping “la Femme Apache” (Myriam Watteau), the wife of one of the robbers, and attempting an escape.

      In a foretelling of later events, she proves far cleverer than he, however, and quickly escapes calling out to the others who join her on the chase. Having been grazed by one of their guns, Marc stumbles on until he reaches a chateau wherein he discovers two women, Elizabeth (Franca Maï) and Eva (former porn star Brigitte Lahaie) who claim to be servants, but are actually the owners of the estate, lovers who are planning for the annual gathering of their blood-loving friends, have sent all their servants off.

      For a long period thereafter, the three play out a wonderfully ridiculous cat-and-mouse game within the mansion, while outside the gang of thieves wait, ready to kill him. Within this domain, surrounded by plush rooms and the enormous beauty of the two women—whose shapely bodies Rollin reveals to us in an intense few moments of lesbian sex—feels utterly safe. He is certainly stronger than these frail beings, even if they demonstrate that they have long knives. He has a gun.

     Fortunately, Marc also has his own secret power, so unlike the males of Rollin’s 1982 masterwork The Living Dead Girl. Marc is a beautiful bond male, who, even in his smugness, is charming and sexually alluring. As a ruse in her attempt to keep him on in the chateau until the evening’s festivities, Eva seduces him, having sex with the intruder, invoking Elizabeth’s jealousy, and perhaps causing her to unintentionally fall in love with him. In a private moment Elizabeth tells Marc of her love for him.

    In the meantime, the robbers, impatient for their money, shoot at the mansion—an activity the women must halt before the evening’s secretive events. Eva steals Marc’s satchel filled with gold and takes it outside to hand over to the gang. As they count the coins, the most brutal of them, husband to the female Marc had attempted to kidnap, forces Eva to strip and change dresses with his wife, before he himself enters into the stable into which he has locked her, to engage in sex.

      Hidden beneath the straw, however, is a huge scythe, which she draws out, killing her would-be rapist, his wife, and two others. The blood-letting that she has attempted to warn Marc about has begun.

      Marc, still believing that he is in control of the situation, now determines to stay the night and meet the mysterious guests the women have mentioned to him, without knowing that his remaining had been their intention all along.

      The Marchioness, Hélène (Fanny Magier), the woman in charge of the midnight affair, finally arrives with her serving women. Marc finds that he is also attracted to the powerful Marchioness,

and at first she and the other women appear to play innocent games with him such as blind man’s bluff. But as midnight approaches, they hint at the truth about the events they planned, even telling him that “no one survives our secret ceremonies.”

     Still unable to believe the truth, but now with some trepidation, Marc finally attempts flight, escaping to the stables. There Eva meets up with him in an attempt to hide him from the others. However, we are not sure whether she might actually be lying and intending to begin the night’s events by slaughtering him. Indeed, male-female relationships throughout this work are completely unpredictable and transient. Only the female relationships seem to be ones of permanence.

      Yet even that becomes questionable when Elizabeth suddenly shows up at the stable and shoots

Eva for her seeming betrayal. As Eva, severely wounded, stumbles back toward the chateau, the other women approach her on the bridge and quite literally drain the rest of the blood from her, an act to which Eva appears to almost willingly give herself up.

       Marc now imagines that he can flee with Elizabeth, reminding her that she has told him she loved him. But she denies any love of him as she shoots him as well, reporting back to the other women where they may find the male’s dead body.

       As critic Kevin Lyons, writing in the EOFFTV Review observes, there are several possible readings of the work. One might read it as “a Marxist sub-text, portraying the cloistered elite as (literally) blood sucking parasites feeding off the working masses whom they treat as nothing more than cattle.”

       But the important text here, I would argue as does Lyons, is the feminist one, in which the females finally consume the object of their oppression. Lyons posits that these women prove that they are able “to overcome the threat posed by Marc – the very epitome of masculine brutality”—although I suggest that he was never truly in power, as they took pleasure in the pretense of making him feel safe and comfortable in their arms before they laid him out for the kill. As Rollin suggests time and again, in his highly Romantic conception of love there is a much sexual titillation and fascination in the seduction as there is in the recognition that death is often the result.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).