The Night of the Hunted (Nuit des traquées, La, 1980)

Jean Rollin

France

93 min, color, French (English subtitles)

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

Filmed on a lunch money budget, with an star-studded cast of porn actors, in desolate locations of after-hours office buildings, this film is usually blasted even by Rollin fans, who abhor its minimalist sets, the total lack of vampires, the absence (as it turns out, incorrect) of virgins, and the stupid script. Me? I like it. In fact, The Night of the Hunted is among my favorite Rollin films, and has been ever since I saw it for the first time several years ago.

Veronique is abandoned in the woods	Elisabeth desperately clinging to a memory

The story is linear and, despite claims to the contrary, easily intelligible. A radiation leak has affected a bunch of people whose brains are slowly rotting away, cell by cell, and they gradually lose their memories, get random anxiety attacks, and become prone to flashes of rage and violence. The government has tucked them away in a "black tower," a shiny office building, where a heartless doctor and a few henchmen oversee their descent into zombie-state torpor even as they try to administer medicine to alleviate their suffering.

Only another's presence can save them	The oppressing bleak corridors of the asylum

The film opens with nightgown-clad Elisabeth (Brigitte Lahaie) running through the woods at night until she eventually is caught, deer-like, in the flashlights of a passing car. The driver Robert (Vincent Gardere) takes her with him even though she cannot remember where she is or why she is running. She is not alone: her friend Veronique (Dominique Journet) has followed her too but before she can draw Robert's attention, the two drive off, leaving the naked girl slumping helplessly against a tree. Elisabeth cannot even recall if there was anyone else with her, and we soon learn that she can retain almost no memories, losing them as soon as events drift past her immediate surroundings.

Another attempt at physical closeness	Veronique and Elisabeth plot their escape

The theme of memory loss and its effect on the individual, who is usually taken to become less of a person because of it, is central to Rollin's work. Despite its apparent distinctiveness, this film fits rather neatly in the director's oeuvre. The sick people here seek comfort in the present since neither the past nor the future can exist for them. They form false instant memories for each other even though they are painfully aware that they will soon lose them---still, for a few fleeting minutes, they forget that these memories are fake and can relieve their anxiety by cuddling with their imaginary past. They are driven to seek closeness with others, desperately afraid to be let alone with their emptying brains, a loneliness much more profound than the hardest solitude in a remote mountain. (Recall the memory device in the original Star Trek episode that wiped out a person's memory, driving him insane with loneliness.)

Automating movement and vanishing memory	Temporary solace amid empty hallways

This desire to be with somebody is explicitly sexual for the sense of touch, the tactile memory, seems to be the only thing that these people can retain for more than a few minutes. But they still forget, and in a sense, each time they have sex is the first---they are the constant virgins. Almost as soon as Elisabeth and Robert reach his apartment, they have sex. For Elisabeth, it is an attempt to retain a memory, to capture a still photograph of her life that can help her remember who she is. For Robert, it becomes much more than a casual one-night stand for he soon falls in love with her. The prolonged copulation scene (almost five minutes) is very tender, with the camera lingering either on Elisabeth's face as she is nearly absent but not quite so, struggling to keep the feeling literally inside her, or focusing on her body as both the source and container of her fading sense of self.

The blood of the rapist	Anxiety takes over during intercourse

Unfortunately, as soon as Robert leaves for work, she forgets all about him, and when Dr Francis (Bernard Papineau) and his sultry assistant Solange (Rachel Mhas) come to take her back to the asylum---having followed Robert's car---she is almost eager to go with them, for now they are her entire world, and she is utterly afraid of being left alone. The three walk across empty plazas, vast open spaces that form a bleak landscape, with bluish hue making everything look ghostly under an overcast sky. There are no people in office areas that should normally be bustling with life. The demands of the low budget that have forced Rollin to film in these spaces after work hours when everybody has left actually work to his advantage for they superbly convey the sense of physical emptiness that corresponds to the mental state of these people. A few shapes and forms still populate their world but there is hardly any life left in it.

More surfaces with no detail	Attempting to flee their captors

Elisabeth is taken to her room where she finds Catherine (Catherine Greiner) who not only cannot remember her but also has trouble with her motor-skills. She is prone to violent shaking and cannot even put food in her mouth. Elisabeth comforts her, they invent childhood memories of each other, but as soon as the stark reality comes back to Catherine, she weeps despondently. In a touching scene, Elisabeth feeds her, and the caring touch calms down the poor creature. The two then wander the hallways of the building where similarly afflicted people pace aimlessly or are passively sunk against the walls. They are all there but they can hardly even communicate anymore. A woman (Nathalie Perrey) is looking for her child whose name or sex she cannot remember, another one flips through a photo album in the hope that an image will trigger a memory, but we don't even know if this album belongs to her.

The famous scissors death	Elisabeth confronts Veronique's death

Elisabeth resolves to find a way out and leaves Catherine in their room to look for an escape route. Catherine, whose attempt at sexual closeness with Elisabeth has just been rebuffed, lies naked on the bed, with her memories sipping out of her head, and her loneliness becoming ever scarier. She plays with a pair of scissors and tells herself repeatedly that Elisabeth will never come back for she will forget both their room and Catherine. In the meantime, Elisabeth runs into Veronique, who happens to remember her, and when Elisabeth finds Robert's phone number on a piece of paper, they decide to call him (even though at this point Elisabeth does not even know who he is). Elisabeth returns to her room to get Catherine so she can come with them but finds her dead on the bed: the scissors gruesomely embedded in her head, a blade in each eye.

Gratuitous shot of Brigitte Lahaie	Elisabeth's mind is slowly wasting

Elisabeth and Veronique attempt their escape, shooting and killing several guards in the process, and they finally get to a phone and call Robert. But as soon as they leave the building in the darkness, their anxiety overpowers them and before long they are caught by the doctor's henchmen. During this time, we witness several brutal scenes as violence erupts among the other patients. An orderly (Cyril Val) takes advantage of the helpless women: he offers to take them to their rooms (whose location they cannot remember) but then rapes them. He has done this for some time, and, given that these women promptly forget the incident, he may have raped some of them more than once, and each time they willingly go with him. This time, however, as he rapes an unnamed blonde, another patient walks up behind him and bashes his brains out with a hammer. Another patient collapses in an anxiety attack and calms down only when another one, a woman (Veronique Delaisse), comforts him. She leads him to a sauna (after a brief swim in the nude), where they have sex. But he deteriorates so quickly that his anxiety returns during their intercourse and he strangles her. The eruption of violence provides a strange counterpoint to the placid descent into oblivion when first Veronique and then Elisabeth reach the terminal stage of the illness.

In the train to extermination	Stuffing a body into the oven

Everything seems lost and Elisabeth even walks right past Robert without recognizing him. The doctor, having realized that the entire operation is a failure and that it could be exposed by Robert, has moved everyone to an abandoned storehouse at a railway station. There, his henchmen proceed to destroy all the evidence: the catatonic people are killed with a syringe and their bodies incinerated in an oven. The matter-of-fact deliberateness of the proceedings is reminiscent of a Nazi extermination camp. When two of the henchmen decide to let Veronique go because one of them detects a spark in her eye, another shoots her from behind. Elisabeth wanders out but when Robert tries to follow her, the doctor shoots him in the head. In the most poignant unforgettable scene of the film, the two dying people walk haltingly away from the camera, a painful reverse of the "they went into the sunset" ending. Elisabeth does not know who he is but the fact that he is a human being is enough to comfort her in her last minutes, and his damaged brain probably can no longer make much sense of anything except that he wants to be with her.

Elisabeth wanders amid empty trains	They walked into the dim afternoon

The Redemption DVD presents the film in a non-anamorphic 1.66:1 original ratio. Even though it has been mastered from Rollin's own master negatives, the film exhibits a fair amount of damage: lots of specks, some color shifts, and the occasional frame drop. It is not clear how much of this is print damage and how much is due to budget constraints. The acting is hammy most of the time although here and there Lahaie and Journet manage to deliver some haunting performances. Still, not much in the way of extras either about the film or the actors: only a small photo gallery and a dull trailer. The film was later released with hardcore inserts and although some sites claim that the DVD comes with explicit extra scenes, it does not. I cannot see why anyone would want to watch an explicit version of this anyway.

November 25, 2005