Spine 571: Black Moon

Our second in this pair of Louis Malle at his weirdest, Black Moon (1975) is an Alice in Wonderland-ish coming of age story during a literal battle of the sexes. We were concerned about a French male director making such a movie at the height of second-wave feminism, but Malle is nothing if not surprising. Malle claims he wrote the film on a sort of automatic writing while also changing course whenever a plot line looked like it might be emerging, which leaves us with a film quite widely open to interpretation. Black Moon's surreal nature also gets a big help by being shot by longtime Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist.