Sucubbus

After making several "normal" horror/exploitation films, Franco indulged in this baffling but engaging fever-dream of supernatural fantasy. Around this time, Franco, like his French counterpart Jean Rollin, began an arty phase, weaving haunting scenes of surrealism, eroticism, and horror into enigmatic, loosely constructed stories.

Both directors were notorious for writing scripts a few hours before shooting or starting a film without a script based on a dream, trusting improvisation and inspiration to furnish the rest of the story. The difference is that Rollin usually discovered some logical explanation along the way for all the weird goings on, while Franco's work remains ambiguous.

Our story begins with the beautiful redhead Lorna (Janine Reynaud) as a dominatrix in an avant-garde S&M nightclub act for jaded sophisticates. She is the symbol of dangerous seduction and the obsession of men and women alike. Her Mephistophelean manager (Jack Taylor) has somehow transformed her into "the essence of evil - a devil on earth", but how and why is left unexplained. There are long, lyrical dream sequences (nicely shot in soft, hazy tones) where she repeatedly returns to a Gothic castle by the sea. Roaming through the elegant rooms, she has memories of a past life as a countess. (Her thoughts, like the thoughts of most of the characters, are related via narration.) In a highly effective scene, a room full of mannequins dressed in period gowns become animated and threatening.

As fantasy and reality blend together, there are many strange encounters, tastefully restrained nude scenes (unusual for Franco), a few murders that may be hallucinations, and a decadent party straight out of "La Dolce Vita". In fact, Franco seems to be under the spell of Fellini (especially "Juliet of the Spirits") for much of the film.

As the story shifts from Portugal to Berlin, there are some nice scenes of the austere German city and creative shots (reflections in a car window, ducks on a pond) accompanied by poetic and philosophical musings. Clearly, there is some kind of artistic intent here despite a flawed and confusing narrative. A profusion of random ideas and beautiful/bizarre images pop up like wildflowers all over this crazy dreamscape but offer no explanation. Like many David Lynch films, the story is a head-scratcher, but there is enough stylish and visually rewarding material to make it worth seeing.

The timing was right. Art house sex films were all the rage and the marketing in the States was simple and brilliant, taking good advantage of punters seeking cinema kicks during the dawn of the sexual revolution. A phone number was published for people to call who wanted to know what the title meant. The bewildering erotic-horror element and the hallucinatory visuals and dialogue were not what many of them expected.

Old-timers in the Manhattan theatrical exhibition business told me it did very well at the box office. The put-downs by Canby and Ebert didn't hurt. Newspaper of the subway crowd, The New York Post, gave it a good review. The gloss of Euro-sophistication gave it a veneer of respectability that the crude sleaze of routinely shot American sexploitation films lacked. Viewers didn't feel the urge to slink out of the theater trying not to be seen.

In today's DVD and streaming world, with thousands of independent theaters now vanished from the landscape, without titillating ads in big city newspapers, Succubus-style films released today would be quickly forgotten.

The performer Lorna Green (Janine Reynaud) is a dominatrix in a S&M show in a nightclub and lover of the producer, William Francis Mulligan (Jack Taylor). Lorna attracts the attention of a stranger that believes she is the essence of evil and controls her mind. Lorna has sex with Mulligan and has a weird dream where she stabs a man with a needle in the eye. On the next morning, she is walking with Mulligan and sees a hearse on the road. When she glances at the corpse, she sees the man of her dream and cries. Soon Lorna has other daydreams followed by murders and she starts to blend reality with dreams. Soon she is confused with her nightmares and her memories from a past life when she was a countess. Meanwhile the stranger plots a scheme against Lorna with Mulligan.

"Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden", a.k.a., "Succubus", is the first movie of Jess Franco outside Spain because of the censorship in his country. This movie is financed by Germany and produced in West Germany. Considered a cult movie for many viewers, I had a great expectation but I found it boring and with a messy screenplay. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Succubus"

Hoo, boy, I don't even know where to begin with this one! Jess Franco's "Succubus"--his first of four films in 1967 alone, in a career oeuvre that as of this date contains around 190 (!) pictures--takes a sharp turn from the director's previous pictures, many of which ("The Awful Dr. Orloff," "The Sadistic Baron von Klaus," "Dr. Orloff's Monster" and, especially, "The Diabolical Dr. Z") had been perfectly lucid, imaginatively shot, beautifully photographed B&W minimasterpieces. "Succubus" is a film that is almost impossible to synopsize, much less figure out...even more so than Franco's "Venus in Furs" (1968). The only other films I can compare it to, in my limited experience, as far as surrealism, "trippiness" and the ability to both dazzle and frustrate the viewer are concerned, are Jaromil Jires' "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" (1970) and perhaps Alejandro Jodorowsky's "El Topo" (1971). But "Succubus" is a much lesser film than those other two, and infinitely more boring and pretentious (capital "P"). The film seems to concern an S&M nightclub performer named Lorna (played, it must be granted, with some authority by model Janine Reynaud) who may or may not be a hell-sent succubus or perhaps merely a psychotic serial killer. Or perhaps Lorna is only dreaming. Or fantasizing. Really, it is hard to say for sure, and anyone who speaks with great authority regarding this film is full of hooey, as even Franco himself, during a 22-minute interview on this fine-looking Blue Underground DVD, admits to not understanding his own movie! He excuses this, though, by remarking that Jean-Luc Godard once told him that a picture does not have to be understood to be successful. Oy gevalt. Making matters worse is the fact that Reynaud herself is a completely unsympathetic/unattractive performer, although still kinda sexy (perhaps future Franco muse Soledad Miranda would have worked better here). Among the assorted bits of strangeness that the film dishes out are some weird word-association games, a pianist playing his instrument while looking at a math book, an LSD party, some very mild lesbianism in a room full of mannequins, and the fact that the picture seems to have been edited with an eggbeater. On the plus side: some dreamlike soft-focus photography, pretty scenery of Portugal and Berlin, and some strikingly beautiful images, such as lovers viewed through a fish tank (but signifying what?). Equal parts tedious and fascinating, the film was slapped with an "X" rating in the U.S. back in '69 ("X" for "Excruciating"? "Exhausting"? "Extremely hard to follow"?), its trailer proclaiming "The most unusual picture of the year...perhaps, of years to come." In a picture filled with so much ambiguity, that statement, at least, is decidedly true. Get some ergot-based derivative inside you and see for yourself!

I am fascinated by simple things: watching a 'feelgood' movie makes you feel good, and the opposite. Yet, this simple process comes from the most astounding mechanism, which props up every aspect of waking life. You pick your friends this way, dream, suffer and love this way—all intuitively, without much conscious thought.

Now turn to this film. Franco is sort of a gamble for me. He works so fast, that when cameras start rolling the thing is basically half-formed and taking shape as you watch. This is nice. I don't mean to make any excuses for what the films clearly lack, but it's an interesting way to make films, more loose than usual; what some of the best filmmakers attempt, trying to sneak up to who is really watching. It's a living experience if you can stay mindful. (by contrast to someone like Kubrick or Nolan who puts the vision first, deftly maps everything ahead of time so it reaches you lifeless)

So for me, the gamble is squeezing past the sloppy overall vision faster than you can reason. This is staying mindful, by which I mean let yourself be neither numbed nor swayed by the sex or violence or the apparent sloppiness. If you don't squeeze past fast enough, you'll be stuck behind a wall of finding faults, not a fun place to be. If you do, Franco can reward because that is the level where he starts to be intuitively interesting; the idea is to be already on the inside when he starts tethering images.

Sometimes when you get there, it's just empty fabric, but sometimes not. The point is that he can work on a semiconscious level, which is not conscious thought and most filmmakers utterly miss. This film gets there better than any of the rest I've seen.

The main premise is a woman unsure of herself and reality. The opening scene is in a dungeon where she has a couple tied up and playfully tortures them with a knife, this would be the typical Franco film you are geared to expect but we soon find it's a staged scene, pointing at fabrication. Back home, she performs a striptease for her man but he's bored and rolls to sleep. The next scene is where, dismayed, she walks out as if in a dream and wanders to a seaside castle, where apparently she has another life and a child. More. She suffers from amnesia, and later she pops with others in a party what looks like acid tabs.

This is all loosening up reality so we can get to the interesting stuff, simple entry points.

So the film is where the woman wanders around in a narrative haze of folded time, not unusual for Franco. But there's more than languid air here. Franco namedrops Godard at one point, I was reminded more of Resnais and later Raoul Ruiz, who was also influenced by Resnais.

Men approach her claiming to know her (we presume sexually), but she can't remember. Won't?

All sorts of hypnotic images intrude in her story, usually of men who pressingly ask questions about art and pop culture—a Godardian 'loan'. Her man assumes the role of Mickey Spillane and slaps and interrogates her as if she's a film noir dame holding out on him. At the party, the host reads up from a book about the woman as temptress and succubus who seduces, leads astray and drains men. All this reinforces a sense of sexual guilt and suffocation.

Superficially, it's about the woman's journey through masculine perceptions of her, boring if you think of it in the Catholic context which the conscious mind of Franco was probably addressing. Superficially, this is presented to us as 'brainwashing' by her man. Bo- ring.

What's powerful about this, is wondering a bit about who or what is tethering images into a story. This is beyond conscious control of images, up to you to ponder.

From the inside of her dream, you can't separate inside from outside, images simply bubble up in some order. These images are all her own dream, gradually they take the form of violent urges, being in that story gradually she feels more impure. What is causing this to happen? What starts out as her own reverie, is it slowly polluted by these other perceptions?

Surely making out with the young girl is her own genuine urge to be apart from men, interrupted by the compulsive desire to kill. Or is it? Is it something her man would fantasize about, who she wants to please? Is she becoming the character imagined of her? Is the self fetching the images or the other way around, the images gradually acquire a self?

This right here is the level where Franco is intuitively interesting. It is that semi-abstract space of story not tainted by logical mind, involuntary memory. If you have to see only a single Franco film, make it this or Eugenie De Sade.