There’s a beautiful moment where Frédéric attends a screening of one of Jean Rollin’s films. As Stephen Jones and Kim Newman point out in their commentary, it’s a typical meta moment from this era’s generation of avant-garde genre filmmakers that suddenly transcends and reaches an ethereal plane.
Rollin’s movies are irreverent because they have no time for narrative logic or convention, and only time for artistic introspection, and in this moment we become part of something bizarre and venture into the beyond. This where Frédéric is cast from the etiquette of a comfortable life and thrust into the night where it’s harder to differentiate between what we believe and what is real – he descends into a past he has no idea is part of his present, will define his future – he is on that slow, inevitable journey towards the confrontation of the self, where we must meet ourselves, for perhaps the first time, where the next phase of being begins – there, we learn what it means to live, we finally decide for ourselves what is next. We don’t know why we’re heading that direction, and we don’t know what’s waiting for us, but we continue the trek anyway, because we must, because we’re compelled, because life is nothing if it’s not evolving, if it’s not continuously revealing who we really are, because we’re always changing, we’re always looking forward, yet at the same time looking backwards, perhaps to capture something we’ve forgotten, a memory, or maybe even a sense of something we can’t put into words, something that will provide one small piece of this grand puzzle we spend our entire lives trying to complete.
Movies, even when they’re elliptical, even when they seemingly don’t make sense, serve as a blueprint of the human condition. Rollin’s aesthetic seems unmatched in that sense, as his stories aren’t just printed on a page or projected onto a screen, but magically brought to life, unflinching in their confrontation of the self, sucking us into the screen and taking us on a journey that is surreal and foreign yet frighteningly familiar.
