The Iron Rose 1973

Happened to watch "The Iron Rose" a surreal horror film directed by Jean Rollins, on a rather windy Sunday. Jean Rollins is a known European film director, who made several horror films on Vampires (female vampires get special attention from him) most of which follow the conventions of horror films with extra gore and sleaze. I watched "The Lips of Blood" by the ame director a few years ago and there was not much in it that left a lasting impression on me, maybe I will see the movie again just to recapitulate the contents. I have always regarded films as a medium of entertainment and as well as a medium of art. I can watch a thriller, a comedy and an action movie but I also love films that go beyond the usual entertainment and present themselves as art forms which are rich in visuals, themes and symbolism just like a beautiful painting that can be interpreted in several different ways. Like in Michelangelo Antonioni' movie "Blow Up" where a character, who is a painter tells his friend that when he starts his work he has no aim or direction in his mind but when he completes it, he steps back and tries to interpret his own work. Similarly, a movie should be a work of art that makes the audience think, forces them to draw their own inferences and interpretations and keeps them busy talking about them for perhaps years and as such, these movies do not go stale anytime and with every viewing, you uncover something new something more subtle.

The movie starts with a young poet meeting a young girl at a wedding dinner and needless to say, is attracted by her. Both of them plan to meet and on the man's insistence, they plan to spend the day picnicking in an old, decrepit cemetery that has been lying in wasteful neglect for years as fallen leaves, overgrown shrubs, disheveled grave markers and rusting iron fences indicate.

Making their way through the overgrown vegetation, they chance upon a crypt (an underground burial chamber) they descend into, to spend some intimate moments. By the time they come out of the crypt, they find that Sunset has already happened and that it is all cold and dark with presumably only these two persons in the vast cemetery. They go about find their way back to the exit but looks like they reach everywhere in the cemetery except the gates. As they run around, frantically trying to retrace their steps back to the exit, the girl's courage starts to give away, while the man, not wanting to show his mounting confusion and nervousness tries to put up a sense of control over the situation and soon after they descend into the blame game and the girl tries to flee in panic only to be followed by the man, who tries to, in a sense, molest her which stops after emotions have subsided and reality dawns on them once again.

Then all of sudden, the girl who was panicking at the idea of being lost in a huge decrepit cemetery suddenly finds peace with its morbid surroundings and starts to poetically romanticizing about the death and how the dead have become their "friends" and that there is nothing to fear. This sudden change in the girl's behavior causes the man to panic and flee and in the dark he falls into an abyss that we later find out is a open mass grave strewn with skulls and bones of those who were interred in it. The girl comes along and helps the man out of the pit. While the man is in a state of shock, the girl seems to be perfectly enjoying being in the creepy environs of the cemetery and she even secretly transports a human skull from the pit the man had fallen into.



The man realizes that he left his wrist watch in the crypt they spent their time in and goes in it to retrieve it, the girl shuts the crypt's door and then goes around ballet dancing in the cemetery amidst the fog, the tombstones, the crosses and sculptures of Cherubs in the dark of the night, which needless to say gives an eerie and very disturbing feel to the whole sequence. As the dawn break, the girl goes back into the crypt, where her now-dead boyfriend is and shuts the door.

The film is not for mass consumption as there is hardly any character development, any story or a even a hint of a plot. There are no ghosts, witches, flesh eating ghouls or the walking dead (zombies). There are no slit throats, no fountains of blood, no dismembered body parts or anything one would associate with a horror movie. Actually, the horror plays in the minds of the characters and in the minds of the audience. The night time photography is excellent and the director succeeds in creating a calm yet dreadfully beautiful. There are some scenes and characters that do not make sense at all and there are something that look out of place. Like the wedding dinner at the start of the movie, where the man spots this woman but looks like no else notices the girl and her presence and in individual shots she is the only person in the frame suggesting that there is a physical disconnect between her and the rest of the world. If one wants to watch a film, please approach it has a piece of artwork on celluloid and not as a film for entertainment. The things are not laid out and explained and the director leaves it to the viewers to arrive at their own conclusions.

(Images: Google)