(2002)
Overall: GOOD
A few years after his long-awaited return to form with 1997's Les deux orphelines vampires, Jean Rollin's next archetypal fantastique film Dracula's Fiancée, (La fiancée de Dracula), went into production, continuing his singular, throwback trajectory. During the shooting, Rollin was unfortunately undergoing kidney disease treatment and was regularly off-set, which led to occasional collaborator Jean-Noël Delamarre taking over some of the location filming. Speaking of locations, Rollin's favorite locales including the Dieppe beach and Seine-et-Marne château are present, plus Brigitte Lahaie, Nathalie Perry, and Catherine Castel return in supporting roles. Even with Rollin's absentee health issues in tow, it still has the look and feel of the filmmaker's more prominent works from decades past. A fairy tale type logic is maintained where seemingly arbitrary rules apply to an endless amount of rituals involving manic nuns, evil sorceresses, a wicked, love-stricken dwarf, an ogress, and a Van Helsing type character plus sidekick all seemingly playing some sort of role in freeing, (or holding captive), Count Dracula himself who has been promised a willing bride.
(2007)
Overall: GOOD
Though it was his penultimate work in cinema, Jean Rollin's La nuit des horloges, (The Night of the Clocks, Night Clocks), acts much more as a proper swan song for the filmmaker. Not only does it feature archival footage from most if not all of his previous entries in the fantastique genre as well as several of his favorite actors, but the story itself blurs the lines with what happens to an artist and their creations once they are no longer alive to create. Characters both new and old play real life variations of
themselves, floating in and out of a variety of scenes while former
pornographic actress turned writer/director Ovidie searches for the
presumably deceased Rollin, (here given the name Michel Jean). The meta angle is an interesting one, serving as a quasi-autobiographical musing on a career's worth of bizarre, nostalgic, erotic, violent, and captivating images, presented in the ethereal, dreamlike, and purposely slow-paced fashion that Rollin exclusively works in. On the one hand, the repetitive dialog, meandering nature of the plot, and clearly minuscule production values can hardly be seen as faults since such things are unmistakable in all of the director's movies, but outside of it being a part greatest hits compilation, it does not quite conjure up the same majestic, macabre weirdness of the films that it homages to. Still, it is definitely worth seeing for Rollin fans who are clearly the only people that this was made for in the first place.
(2009)
Overall: MEH
Jean Rollin officially closed out his career with the typically strange, barely budgeted fantastique film Le Masque de la Méduse, (The Mask of Medusa). An hour long cut of it was originally screened at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse film institute before Rollin shot an additional twenty-minutes and then re-edited the whole into its finished, two-part form. It mostly takes place at the Theatre du Grande Guignol though the famed Père Lachaise Cemetery where Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, George Méliès, and Sarah Bernhardt are buried is also used in the latter segment. The story itself is a simplified reworking of the Gorgon Greek mythology tale with Rollin's wife Simone in the title role, delivering a particularly, (yet surely deliberately), unemotive performance. While this has the same comatose pacing that is always present in Rollin's work, it is all done on such a minor scale and with the most limited of production values that no bewitching atmosphere is accomplished. Instead, it is just heavily talky and stagnant, with a strange enough tone that makes it difficult to tell if the several moments of goofiness are there on purpose or acciental. Some of what is going on here is fascinating and it is certainly a treat that we got one last cinematic full-length out of Rollin before he respectfully checked out, but this really only functions as a minor curiosity.
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