Whether intentionally or not, Jesse Franco films can be strangely allusive. Like Godard, he shoots quickly and cheaply (in one year he made 12 films!), yet can remain startlingly true to his own vision. Like Godard he sometimes focuses on female characters to critique masculine structures of power. Like Godard he uses a crime genre to subvert its assumptions, reducing narrative to a minimum, expanding 'superfluous' scenes to bursting point. Like Godard and Altman he foregrounds the female body, but refuses to eroticise it. Like Melville's LE SAMOURAI, the heroine's power in LES AVALEUSES is based on both the donning of an 'armour'-like uniform, and on a muteness (here literal), a refusal to enter into the matrix of language that is the foundation of male-dominated society.
the heroine, Irina Karlstein, is a beautiful Countess who has inherited the family 'problem' of vampirism. spending most of the movie deshabille, her homicidal method is a variation on the traditional bloodsucking more appropriate, shall we say, to a decade that produced DEEP THROAT. She does not discriminate in her prey between male and female. A melancholy voiceover reveals her lack of control over this 'gift'.
Intercut with this plot are a series of 'male' narratives, including a pretentious writer almost supernaturally attuned to nature who can divine her presence, and many even be her creator; a detective and pathologist who disagree on the nature of the serial slayings; and a blind, possibly Teutonic, hippy.
How do you describe a Jesse Franco film without veering into the unprintable? Apparently, Franco shot two versions, one emphasising horror, the other, er, lovemaking. It is easy to sneer and most critics do, but has anyone actually systematically examined his oeuvre, his themes, his imagery? Because he has a very distinctive visual style as hostile to narrative comforts as Godard, an alienating melange of absurd romanticism and pedantic distance, excruciating close-up and disjointed editing, exploitative voyeurism and liberating point of view.
It wouldn't be right to call it * either, which depends for its success on an onion-like structure, a gradual formal disrobing if you will. Franco denies us this by clothing his heroine like Margarita on her broom in Bulgakov's novel - thus we have nothing to look forward to, our power of undressing is denied. This makes the film almost, weirdly feminist: the profusion of painfully extended scenes - explicit, yet ungraphic, ranging from lesbianism to onanism - seem very private, empowering rites excluding us (the presumed male viewer?) from participation, forcing us to watch.
AVALEUSES doesn't cheat as a horror film either, from its sex/death thematics to a rarefied setting to a scientific endeavour linked to law defeated by primeval forces. Irina is linked to the forest - she IS sexuality - and the film is full of gorgeous colours, and a use of red filter which might be a tribute ot LE MEPRIS.
But, perversely for a film featuring a mute and a blind man, the film is best enjoyed ,as Sirk desired, with one's eyes closed - whatever one thinks of the movie, the soundtrack is a masterpiece, enriching what we're watching; a magnificently varied mix of lounge, jazz, Legrandesque romanticism, 60s pop etc. You never want it to end, a coitus continuus if you like.
