This may not be the type of movie that will thrill an audience with jump scares or play well at a Halloween party. It is, however, a movie that has some frightening moments within it and images that have stayed with me longer than the latest elevated horror movie that I have been promised will keep me awake at night and dominate my thoughts. That never happens with those movies. It has with Litan.
This is a movie that depends on what you see more than what the film tells you. In that you will be the judge if what you see is in the minds of the characters, if the magic is real, and if these moments are happening. Even the title takes a bit of thought, as a litany is a form of prayer, usually spoken by a priest, in which the celebrant makes spoken petitions to a higher being and the followers answer with a fixed response. If you’ve been to a Catholic Church, there are six approved litanies, and most are answered with “Lord have mercy on us.”
Your enjoyment of this film will also depend on your willingness to accept things like faith and that there could be something beyond all this, even if some of the characters directly state that they have no belief. This film is at once a fantastique – the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative – and a juxtaposition of that concept.
But, hey – let’s stop using college words and talk about the movie.
Nora (Marie-José Nat) has a premonition that shocks her out of her ordinary life and sends her into the streets of Litan, a village amid a Festival of the Dead. Yet, this isn’t a co-opted Pagan rite-turned-commercial. Things just feel off. Way off. As she seeks her husband, Jock (director and writer Jean-Pierre Mocky), she encounters people dressed as clowns and animals, all as silver masked men who look like Fantomas by way of Destro keep on playing music.
Jock is in this town to excavate something. The kind of something that unleashes lightning snakes that make their way into the water supply, causing some to fade away literally and others to become catatonic. Others just start killing everyone else.
Nora keeps searching for him through cobblestone alleys and narrow hallways and everywhere she goes, that dream is still calling to her.
As for those electrical beings, Dr. Steve Julien (Nino Ferrer) seems to know what they are, and he isn’t telling anyone.
It all feels like The Prisoner trapped in the mountains of the religious backwoods of Don’t Torture A Duckling by way of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and a hospital that is very Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – if his temperament is any indication, Commissioner Bolek (Roger Lumont) must have gone to police academy with Arthur Kennedy’s character – but these are only touchstones that I’ve put along the way for myself because this is so much its own trip that you need something to guide you back.
There are many kinds of movie lovers, but for the sake of this argument, there are two. In the oddest moments of Inferno, when Argento seems to be making it all up literally as he’s filming or perhaps is capturing another reality that he barely comprehends, some people grow frustrated by the utter lack of story and the constant shifts. And some grow excited by it.
If you are the latter – I hope you are – you’re the right person to come to Litan.
Also: if you believe in lucid dreaming, yet also understand that dreams are like rapids that we can’t ford across in our boats of limited human understanding, you will also find something here.
Also also: If you are on the right side of the “artist versus hack” arguments regarding the works of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco, you’ll also feel that warm blanket feeling of droning doom here.
Why does Nora see Jock covered in blood as coffins float down rivers and bodies fall from the sky?
What happened to Eric (Terence Montagne) and why is he hooked up to the machines of Dr. Julien? Eric also unleashes perhaps the most ferocious dialogue in the film, telling us, “We’re dreaming your life and when the dream stops, you die.”
Why is the score – by Ferrer, yes, the same person playing the doctor – shift from 80s Eurohorror ala Goblin to synth to whatever those metal-faced people are playing, which is the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich?
Jock asks Nora at one point, “If God exists, what difference does it make if you’re alive or dead?” In the middle of a festival celebrating death, two people are trying to get out of town alive. But they’re not real, they’re just characters in a film, but even so, can we learn from them? Shouldn’t we try to get out alive and stop obsessing about death, which looms in every frame of this as skulls appear every few seconds just at the edges of the frame?
I read one breakdown of this movie that claims that its wild swings emulate old movie serials, where each episode ended in the sure death of its protagonists only for it to all be solved the next week. There’s that. There are echoes of Jodorowsky, of when Fulci stops caring about the plot and gets absolute and when the drugs kick in too.
What does it all mean?
Does it have to mean anything?
Seeing as how this is running in the month of Halloween, I have to confess that this movie won’t be spooky for everyone. Yet, I’ve been obsessed by age as of late, by life change, by legacy. I don’t know if it even matters sometimes. What matters? I’m not sure. I just know that movies make me feel things, deep and meaningful things, and this movie brought me a flood of joy and as there’s a dearth of that in this current timeline, I wanted to share it with you.
Litan is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary byFrank Lafond, an archival making of feature and “Jean-Pierre Mocky, Un Drôle D’Oiseau”, an episode of the TV show Temps X. You can order this set from Severin.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.