The Night Of The Hunted

Forget-Me-Lots

The Night Of The Hunted
aka La nuit des traquées
France 1980 Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: It’s a very simple plot but, even so, this one has spoilers.

It’s a shame that, out of all of Rollin’s more personal films (aka, the ones which weren’t ‘hardcore porn director for hire’ stuff), The Night Of The Hunted isn’t a bit better known because, re-visiting it now on Blu Ray, I’m once again taken with just how good this one is. I mean, yes, it does have a few overly long sex scenes which sometimes seem a little out of place (if no less welcome) but this is actually a very impressive movie and, strangely enough for a director like Rollin, it’s the one of his films that actually feels a lot more like the early work of David Cronenberg (in films like Rabid, Shivers and the more experimental fare he made before those two).

Rollin himself really didn’t seem to like this one and it’s a shame that he didn’t appreciate himself how good this is, I feel. Partially this may be due to a tragedy before the shoot started, which may well have coloured his feelings about it. He was introduced to actress Martine Delva and had her very much in mind for the role of the main protagonist’s friend Veronique. He was so taken with her she became the figurehead for the project in his eyes but, when he invited her out to go on a location scout with him, she turned him down to do something else with one of her friends. That was the last he saw of her because she got into a car accident that night and her life support was turned off one week later.

So that role in the film now is played by Dominique Journet, who does have a striking presence as far as I’m concerned but, ultimately plays second fiddle to the main protagonist played by porn actress and regular Rollin collaborator, the stunning Brigitte Lahaie. Here she plays Elysabeth, who stumbles into the road in front of the car being driven by the lead male character, Robert (played by Alain Duclos). He takes her home to his apartment because she can’t remember where she lives but it’s clear she was running from something. After they make love, he realises she doesn’t even remember who he is or things she knew just a few moments before. She is a puzzle but, certainly, she has some kind of disease similar to advanced Alzheimers. When he leaves her there to go to work, she is removed/abducted and taken to The Black Tower, a kind of prison hospital for a load of ‘patients’ like herself.

Here she encounters another woman who shares the same ‘apartment’ called Catherine, played by Cathy Stewart. Neither of them remember each other and Catherine obviously has an advanced or differently presented version of the disease Elysabeth does because, she can’t even coordinate her movements properly to be able to eat soup and has to be helped. When Elysabeth re-encounters Veronique again, who was escaping with her the night before and who also barely remembers her, they hatch a plan to break out of their sterile prison. She calls Robert on a random telephone number she has kept which he gave her and he tries to rescue them. She goes to collect Catherine but the stress of her condition has already forced her to kill herself by poking her eyes out with a pair of scissors. It’s a moment made more poignant by the truly electric performances of Lahaie and Stewart. Some patients are going crazy and the tower block suddenly becomes a gory deathtrap, if you run into people who react differently to their disease than others and, soon, the guards are taking people away to a train yard for a lethal injection, before they are thrown into a furnace. All this to cover up a disease caused by an accidental government radiation leak that has only affected a certain amount of the population.

And it’s a truly moving film. Rollin uses warm oranges and browns when he can get away with it in the colour palette (such as in Robert’s apartment) but the many scenes shot in the tower are mostly neutral, sterile colours which serve to accentuate the isolation and loneliness of the desperate characters who wander, aimless and lost, in the corridors of the vast apartment building. Yeah, as I said earlier, this one really does feel a bit like an early Cronenberg, for sure.

The performances are much better in this one, in general, than in the majority of Rollin’s earlier work and the tragic sense of the characters slowly creeps up on the audience giving an emotional hit rare in the body of this director’s work (with one big exception if memory serves but, that’s for a future review). It seems quite obvious that the mental deterioration of the patients/prisoners in the film are a metaphor for Alzheimers but also he is obviously making an analogy of the condition to the shuffling zombies often found in films by the likes of George A. Romero. The difference here is that only a handful of the blighted people who inhabit this prison, itself a deliberate metaphor for the modern prison used for the Baader–Meinhof Gang, are in any way dangerous and are just tragic figures.

Despite Rollin’s own dissatisfaction with the end of the movie, it all ends quite eloquently and hauntingly in that Robert is also, for very different violent reasons I won’t go into here, a shambling zombie of a character and as he and Lahie’s character slowly walk towards an uncertain future, we see their hands link together... a sign that somewhere in the back of their forgotten minds they can still sense there was once a connection between them. It’s a beautful moment and one which lingers in the mind after the film has long finished.

The Night Of The Hunted is not one of Rollin’s typical films for sure but it truly is one of the best in his body of work, surely the best of his ‘non-vampire movies’ and I would certainly recommend this one to people who have not yet encountered the director or have been coloured by their expectations of what they’ve seen him do in other areas of his CV. A wonderful, shambling heartbreak of a movie... with added nudity for those who love that extra element.