Perdues dans New York

Lost in New York (1989)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A black woman, partially dressed, sits in the streets. An elderly woman wonders around the streets. Two little girls discover a wooden figure known as the Moon Goddess. The two little girls talk about movies and various locations before they're magically sent from France to New York City where they reemerge as a couple 20-year-old women.

Director Jean Rollin has become a huge cult favorite over the past decade or so due in large part to films like THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, SCHOOLGIRL HITCHHIKERS, LIPS OF BLOOD and THE LIVING DEAD GIRL. Rollin's surreal mix of blood, vampires and lesbians is something fans of Euro Trash crave and the director often delivered the goods. Later in his career he apparently wanted to try something new and from what I've read this here turned out to be a very personal film for him. Sadly, whatever the original plan was, the finished product really isn't all that good and in fact it comes across as a poor man's Jean-Luc Godard film.

Apparently Rollin found himself in New York with a couple actresses and a camera so he filmed them walking around the streets and then when he returned to France he made a wrap-around story. What we've basically got here are the characters walking around for no apparent reason as a narrator (Rollin) throws out various thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts deal with romance. Sometimes these thoughts are about magic. None of them are overly interesting except the stuff dealing with movies where Rollin even mentions some of his own work.

Technically speaking there's nothing too good here as the direction is all over the place and the cinematography isn't that impressive. The entire story seems to have zero ideas as we just basically see people walking around. There are a few memorable moments including the black lady actually turning into the Moon Goddess and doing a nude dance. Fans of Rollin's vampire films will also get to see a very quick look at a vampire here but please don't expect anything horror related. LOST IN NEW YORK thankfully just runs 52-minutes or else things might have been a lot worse.

I very much disliked the whole thing, I can't tell whether this or Iron Rose is worse but they both are very bad movies in my view. Things happen in this movie at least, but it's so mixed up and boring it's hardly a movie at all. I never connected with any of the characters at all. Running at only 52:08 minutes, I have my doubts whether is even supposed to be a "real movie" or Jean thought of it as such. I mean the movie was mainly just random shots in New York with two actors when Jean was on a visit there, it's ridiculous.

Jean Rollin is really a mixed bag. For me he's at his best when he sticks to vampires and castles and artistic/strange symbolism and atmosphere. Those are what he knows, what he's about, what he bring an incredible magic and intrigue to. He's worst when he tries too hard to talk openly in a film about concepts such as "a dream within a dream" and having random things occur for no apparent reason. You can sort of see what he's trying to do at times but for me it just doesn't cut it.

"Lost in New York" happened by chance when director Rollin had the possibility to visit New York with only 2 actresses coming along. The rather spontaneously shot footage he brought home to France was extended by shots on the pebble beach familiar to all Rollin fans. The film thus completed to a length of almost an hour tells us about two young girls who imagine they might be grown up and see New York, later to meet again with their memories as old women, returning to their days of youth. The circular traveling across space and time is done with a magical device, a round wooden thing called Moon Goddess, also impersonated by a dancer, an actress you may remember from "Emmanuelle 6". What makes "Lost in New York" so fascinating is that it is a very open, personal movie, unlike "The Living Dead Girl" for example which needed to satisfy certain expectations of the particular audience it was aimed at. "Lost in New York" is a dream movie, adding up Rollin's artistic visions more freely than other works of his, so that I would actually count it among his five best films. You can let yourself go in the flow of images which are rarely interrupted by dialogs. In opposite to a movie like "Koyaanisqatsi" though, "Lost in New York" does not hit you with a message. Instead you create a viewpoint for yourself: is it magic or just their imagination, which is present or past, which is reality? Obviously, even my summary above contains a good deal of interpretation already. Certainly not a movie for everybody, but if you like to be challenged a bit, try an interpretation of "Lost in New York" in your own way.

I believe Rollin just happened to articulate in terms of horror. Naked bodies, blood, he approached these from the indulgent standpoint of a connoisseur. With the wanton decadence of a dandy.

Vampires were incidental as it turns out, they were usually involved but as seductive instruments of a sensually paced nightmare; it was always, nowhere else more obvious than here and perhaps Night of the Hunted, about the ephemeral wandering. So not an aesthetic, but the sensation of seeing, touching. Memories about these, cravings that unsettle.

This perfectly prefaces his work of twenty years, you should see it if you have solved how Rollin fits in your life. It is about two Alices who transport themselves through a mirror of fictions; the Wonderland as it turns out is eerie, desolate New York. A memory of a journey past? A fanciful, mysterious flight inwards? He frames before and after with an essay on the imaginative mind weaving narratives, fictions, cinema. Mirrors permit the journey inwards, masks.

But Rollin was never erudite, so to speak. He could never quite put to words what he had seen. So we got images of some purity struggling with poor expression. This time he poorly articulates where Jacques Rivette was so agile to improvise from, Raoul Ruiz at around the same time as this came out.

The business with the moon goddess coming alive to dance is just silly, take it with a pinch of salt. The soliloquys are vacant. But a connoisseur likes to indulge the pleasure of tasting, perhaps exaggerate that pleasure for an audience.

But once again the dream relaxes, the wandering. Films about stories are dime a dozen, what is so extraordinary about something like this is that, as cinema has sadly turned out to be, few filmmakers dare to allow us to simply share eyes. To just be sentient for a while.

By nightfall, a constellation of neon adverts in Time Square gleam behind steam rising from black streets like the whole thing with its alien reaches is about to evaporate before our eyes.