review

- the complete review is very long and can be read at -
http://kinetofilm.blogspot.com/2011/01/au-rendez-vous-de-la-mort-joyeuse-1973.html
- It's very much worth the reading. -


AU RENDEZ-VOUS DE LA MORT JOYEUSE (1973)
by Brian Holcomb
KINETOFILM SCORE: 3.5/5

"To call this very peculiar and original supernatural tale Buñuelian is doubly accurate. While it certainly captures the great surrealist filmmaker's sense of the mysterious within the mundane, it was also directed by an actual Buñuel, Juan Luis Buñuel, the master director's son and sometime assistant. The younger Buñuel had a tremendous hurdle to leap in order to establish his own directorial signature and I'm not sure if he ever really did. Jean Renoir had a similar situation as the son of the great impressionist painter but he, importantly, chose a different art form in order to create his own niche. Working in the same medium as his celebrated father, it was perhaps inevitable that Juan Buñuel would find his looming shadow difficult to escape . This was most obvious in his second film, "The Lady with Red Boots"(1977) which was filled with his father's trademarked jokes and familiar faces like Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve in the cast. While delightful in it's own right, that film was more like Buñuel "doing" a Buñuel . It was an accurate, studied facsimile. His first film, "Au Rendez-vous de la Mort Joyeuse" was far more original, spontaneous, and pure. A truly bizarre and disturbing horror film-black comedy that seems to have come much more naturally to the director.

The story is pretty standard but deceptively so: A family moves into a country estate and soon after are plagued by a series of paranormal events which seem to revolve around the teenaged daughter Sophie (Yasmine Dahm). Windows are smashed, furniture moves on it's own and ultimately a visiting friend is viciously attacked and nearly killed. Fleeing the house, they allow a TV crew to move in and attempt to solve the mystery. They do not.

(...)

"This was the basis of a certain strain of cinematic surrealism but in "Au Rendez-vous de la Mort Joyeuse" the younger Buñuel seems to have moved beyond his father's preference for constructing strings of shocking jokes in place of a narrative and gone back to the narrative as spectacle of Feuillade himself. The story is no longer merely a clothesline on which to hang a series of random vignettes but is actually the vehicle driving the movie itself. We not only watch to see what "will happen next", but to see just what in the hell COULD happen next as the events get stranger and stranger. The film has a hypnotic power that is not dream-like but rather dream-real. It's as though Frederick Wiseman was somehow sent into a madman's nightmare armed with a 16mm camera. There is a sense that anything can happen in this story, no matter how random, odd or inexplicable. What's most impressive, however, is the way these random and inexplicable events seem to occur naturally and out of some inner logic. (...) At this point in the story it still seems as though we are watching a rather ordinary case history of paranormal events. But it's the random that really defines the way the film unfolds and creates one of its most inspired ideas. In every haunted house thriller, believability is always stretched once the family realizes that the house is haunted. Why stay and face more terror? Lame narrative excuses are usually created in order to keep the family from just running off like they should. But here, they actually DO run off once the house goes haywire and only halfway through the movie!

(...)

Bifurcated as it may seem, this half of the story is not a complete break from the first. Sophie shows up almost out of nowhere with her hair no longer in pigtails and wearing a very couture fur coat. She looks like the teen fashion model that actress Dahm really was at the time-Nabokov's nymphette. Her father shows up shortly after, but tellingly her mother never again appears in the film. It's as though Sophie has usurped her place in the household in some kind of mock-Freudian coup.

(...)

What transpires during this final phase of the film is a series of oddball vignettes as the narrative gives way to a freefall of inexplicable events and images. It's at this point that the film reveals that it has been setting up certain symbols throughout which were meant to re-appear in the final act in some subconciously logical way. The elder Buñuel had a personal distaste for symbolism. He felt that it reduced the power of mystery to a kind of intellectual code-breaking which is why his early films in particular, like "L'Age D'Or", are filled with obvious symbols used in nonsensical ways in order to confuse the pretentious. Juan Buñuel seems to have broken from this influence as his use of symbols in "Au Rendez-vous de la Mort Joyeuse" seeks to evoke a more private and self contained point of reference. In a more Kubrickian way, he creates a series of enigmatic and repeated images which clearly mean SOME-thing. Exactly what is open to wide interpretation. In "2001: A Space Odyssey", Stanley Kubrick used the monoliths to visualize something intangible-the alien influence on human evolution and progress. In "Au Rendez-vous de la Mort Joyeuse", there is a filthy old rope that's discovered several times, once in the bed of the younger brother and also the sudden appearance of mounds of dirt. The dirt is first seen smeared all over the drawings of Sophie's father. Later, Perou finds himself being seduced in the dark by what appears to be Sophie but in a precursor to the book and film of "The Shining" she is revealed to be a frightening old hag. When his crew come running after hearing his screams of horror, they discover him writhing in the bed, covered with the same mysterious mound of dirt.

(...)

"Au Rendez-vous de la Mort Joyeuse" is the kind of film that seems simple on the surface like Kubrick's film of "The Shining" but rewards multiple viewings as it becomes clear that there is much significance in the smallest of details. It's a creepy film in the tradition of "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" in which the fear is not from a direct physical threat but rather in the whispered suggestions just below the level of consciousness. One of the film's most amazingly ordinary and yet powerfully surreal scenes involves "two" Sophies seen dressing and undressing at the same time. Reflected in a mirror, we see Sophie dressed in her stylish fur coat and turtleneck sweater as she begins to slowly disrobe staring the whole time at her "innocent" self in the room, dressed in a nightgown and starting to put on the very turtleneck sweater and fur coat her doppelganger has removed. The power of this short and strange scene is enhanced in that there is no music or sound effects to be heard on the soundtrack at all. This is an extremely quiet film which features no scored music and only the most subtle of sound effects judiciously used. Much of the movie has the power of old home movies in which the only accompaniment was often the whirr of the projector which gave the mute people and world on the screen a secret life of its own. It creates the uncanny feeling of something both impossible and magical that just happened to be recorded from reality. An uncanny mood that could be called Buñuelian."