(a.k.a.
ZOMBIE QUEEN; director/screenwriter: Jean Rollin, who cameos as an
uncredited “Salesman.” French dialogue by Jean Rollin and Jacques Ralf.)
Storyline
A twenty-year-old
woman, two years dead and remarkably well-preserved in her coffin in the burial
vaults beneath her family’s empty château, is accidentally resurrected when an
earthquake knocks over a barrel of nuclear waste stored nearby, creating a
strange gas that wafts through the vaults. Initially catatonic, she encounters
the living, with often bloody and horrific results.
Review
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.
LIVING, a
French-language film, is one of Rollin’s most tightly written and planned
productions in his oeuvre─the writer/director, famous for sometimes shooting
without a script, had one for this 1982 cinematic offering, and it shows.
The
film opens with scenes of industrial sites and chemical plants, before cutting
to Rollin’s recurrent blue skies, open bucolic settings and gothic buildings─this
last visual aspect, this time out, is the arresting Valmont family château,
with its twelfth-century architectonics and burial vaults beneath its centuries-spanning
stonework. Cinematographer Max Monteillet (ZOMBIE LAKE, 1981; OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, 1982) captures, with striking clarity, the often-lit and,
prior to Catherine Valmont’s resurrection, quiet atmosphere of this seemingly
isolated country house (though it’s within easy driving distance of a town).
As
with earlier Rollin films (notably THE GRAPES OF DEATH, 1978, and THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED, 1980), mankind, wasteful and self-destructive, botches
it again by storing clumsily stacked toxic waste drums in the underground tunnels
beneath Valmont Château, near the coffin-encapsulated, familial deceased. Two
lowlife movers (who are also part-time grave robbers) make quick work of their
day job and are stealing Catherine Valmont and her
mother’s jewelry when an earthquake knocks one of the toxic barrels to the
ground─a liquid spill and a poisonous, chamber-drifting gas is the result, as
well as dissolving flesh and a woken-from-the-dead Catherine, hungry
for blood and walking catatonic. Caught between a stunned sort-of zombie-vampire and immediate contamination, the movers don’t stand a chance.
A few
minutes later, Catherine (well-played by Françoise Blanchard) wanders through
the spacious house. Phillipe d’Aram’s evocative score highlights Catherine’s
upon-waking walk, flavoring it with flute play to add to the melancholic and haunting
feel of the scenes. It’s clear that the twenty-year-old undead woman is mourning
even as she reels with shock. She later encounters random characters who come into the house (a realtor, her beau, three
burglars), who are summarily killed, drunk and gnawed on, with bright red vivid
blood on display. Catherine is more vampire than zombie, an unspecified creature
who is unique in her representation of undeath in film.
The
scenes where Catherine attacks and eats her victims are elegant and horrific.
This is not the grand guignol of George A. Romero’s DEAD films, but a
woman chewing at small holes in their guts. Monteillet’s cinematography maintains
that Old World European feel of the film, even as the violent and gory
contrasts of Catherine’s aggression are shown.
Catherine’s
childhood and blood-oath friend, Hélène (shown in early flashbacks), enters the
picture. Also well-played by Marina Pierro (SUSPIRIA, 1977), she is at
first shocked by Catherine’s reappearance, then dedicated to protecting her. Hélène
makes it her mission to supply her cognizant friend with food. Hélène insists that Catherine did not die, but was sick and misdiagnosed. Catherine tells her
otherwise, but Hélène, who is slowly going obsessively mad and edging toward
murder, does not believe her.
Catherine
becomes more distressed. She does not want to be alive; she does not want to
kill, drink, and eat people. When two American photographers, shown here and
there in LIVING, cross paths with Catherine and Hélène, things come to a
darkly funny and clever fake-out head, forcing a conversation that Catherine obviously
knew was coming, and Hélène was trying not to think about.
The
intimate finish, like many of violence and gore scenes, is not for the weak of stomach. Its inevitability is logical, given their character
arcs and their blood vows.
The
only thing I don’t like about the all-around excellent flick is the dumb toxic
waste subplot. Rollin, in other films, has deftly not provided explanations,
supernatural or otherwise, to key events, so why now, in LIVING─unless
to show, on a global level, one of its inherent themes (destruction,
self-directed or otherwise)?
Viewers
who are used to faster-paced films may be put off by relatively languid, mood-marinating
tone of Rollin’s work. And this being a Rollin movie, there’s a lot of nudity─little
of it explicitly sexual─per his producers’ mandate: we’ll fund your melancholic
art films if you put naked women in them. Men are shown naked, too, though there’s
little or no frontal nudity on their part.
According
to IMDb, Gregory Heller wrote and directed an American, English-language
version of the film “with the same cast and crew.” He’d “shoot his scenes right
after Jean Rollin.” This English version has not been released and is now
considered lost.
