I have watched a film in a language I do not understand, without subtitles and still managed to follow it and I have dropped off for a section of film and still managed to make sense of it and I have watched films that only partly made sense but this is the first film in which absolutely nothing, from beginning to end, seemed to make any sense whatsoever. The captivating look, complete with masked villagers, a hillside village with tottering buildings and underground caves, is visually entrancing and the constant chasing, being chased, attacks, killings and survival help maintain a level of interest even if we know not why. There are hints and pointers toward dream and the afterlife and of the uselessness of the bureaucratic administrations, the hospital looks more like a prison and the inspector believes nothing and nobody. I notice that the director plays the hero, if that is what he is, at least he is still standing at the end.
8 Reviews
Lost in a labyrinth
ofumalow13 August 2020
This isn't really a horror film per se so much as a surreal waking nightmare in which a married couple visiting a rather Gothic town are increasingly sucked into irrational goings-on. They quickly become fugitives, though exactly why (or from what) is murky. There's a sort of Day of the Dead celebration going on, so people are already wearing masks and fake blood-making it hard to tell there's anything wrong when real accidents, fatalities and supernatural events occur. (Also, an increasing percentage of the population seems to be getting reduced to a catatonic state.)
The whole place seems to be a kind of shadowy laboratory, or perhaps a madhouse, in which (naturally) the inmates have taken over. The conventional thriller-protagonist performances of the leads (Marie-Jose Nat, director Mocky) as they constantly flee or pursue various phenomena, and the conventional early 80s suspense music (with a bit of Goblin influence) doesn't really help this vision cohere as horror, allegory or eccentric fantasia. But its sheer eccentricity holds attention.
Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, nor is it supposed to, and frankly the very prolific director's approach to this kind of semi-fantastical material (not his usual thing--he usually made acerbic comedies) is so matter-of-fact, there's not a lot of atmospheric seduction, let alone terror or uncanniness, despite frequent striking imagery. It's definitely an offbeat film, but it's hard to make out just what the intended point is. There are some arrestingly odd ideas, like experiments on dogs that apparently give them human voices, darting glow-rays in water, crimes that occur without anyone nearby seeming to notice or care...even if few of them actually lead the story anywhere in particular.
Of course, you could argue that the story isn't supposed to "go somewhere," really-it is, like the village itself, a kind of labyrinth without formal beginning or end. And "Litan" is indeed arresting as an alien environment mixing Olde Europe charm/creepiness with hints of sci-fi, horror, and a little "Eyes Wide Shut"-type perversity. It's not quite like anything else (unless you count similar surreal one-offs like Louis Malle's "Black Moon," Moctezuma's "Mansion of Madness," etc.), and thus worth seeing even if there's not much to hold onto beneath the busy, inventive surface.
The whole place seems to be a kind of shadowy laboratory, or perhaps a madhouse, in which (naturally) the inmates have taken over. The conventional thriller-protagonist performances of the leads (Marie-Jose Nat, director Mocky) as they constantly flee or pursue various phenomena, and the conventional early 80s suspense music (with a bit of Goblin influence) doesn't really help this vision cohere as horror, allegory or eccentric fantasia. But its sheer eccentricity holds attention.
Nothing here makes a great deal of sense, nor is it supposed to, and frankly the very prolific director's approach to this kind of semi-fantastical material (not his usual thing--he usually made acerbic comedies) is so matter-of-fact, there's not a lot of atmospheric seduction, let alone terror or uncanniness, despite frequent striking imagery. It's definitely an offbeat film, but it's hard to make out just what the intended point is. There are some arrestingly odd ideas, like experiments on dogs that apparently give them human voices, darting glow-rays in water, crimes that occur without anyone nearby seeming to notice or care...even if few of them actually lead the story anywhere in particular.
Of course, you could argue that the story isn't supposed to "go somewhere," really-it is, like the village itself, a kind of labyrinth without formal beginning or end. And "Litan" is indeed arresting as an alien environment mixing Olde Europe charm/creepiness with hints of sci-fi, horror, and a little "Eyes Wide Shut"-type perversity. It's not quite like anything else (unless you count similar surreal one-offs like Louis Malle's "Black Moon," Moctezuma's "Mansion of Madness," etc.), and thus worth seeing even if there's not much to hold onto beneath the busy, inventive surface.
Surreal dream of the dead
chaos-rampant22 November 2010
I hadn't heard of the name Jean Pierre Mocky before. Taking a look at his filmography it seems he did extensively idiosynchratic cross-genre work that remains not merely obscure but fundamentally unseen. If Litan is anything to go by, I want to see more. This French film is like a distraught female protagonist running through the foggy cobblestone roads and patios of a small provincial town, now and then out of the fog strange masked figures emerge to peer at her, a brass band is playing marching tunes by the river, and the populace behaves in the grip of a demented festive amok. I like how the movie toys with the idea that the general hysteria may not just be part of the celebrating of a local festival, that something more sinister may be afoot, that this feels like a dream because it very well may be. The town hospital doesn't look like a hospital, it looks like the grotesque abstraction of a hospital someone would dream. The movie opens with fragments of images, then a woman wakes up feeling her husband is in peril. As the movie goes on we see those fragments play out as parts of larger pictures, like the dream is fulfilling itself. I also like how the movie doesn't settle conveniently on this point of predestination. All the while a doctor performs tests on a kid the victim of an accident, the kid seems to be clinically dead, yet it isn't. There's a reach to or from the beyond struggling to express itself here and the end may put some viewers off just as well as it may excite others. The only thing for sure here is that Litan is a cult curio that we're only now beginning to discover. It rightfully deserves a place somewhere between Lynch and Jess Franco of Venus in Furs.
Surreal and bizarre black comedy.
HumanoidOfFlesh21 May 2010
"Litan" takes place in a strange French town Litan full of masked citizens and off-beat characters.The coffins are flowing in the stream,the cemetery crosses are on the rocks and the funeral orchestra of silver masks is playing some weirdo music.Add also a lot of running and screaming and some bloody murders and you have a winner."Litan" is a surreal and dreamlike assault on viewer's perception.The script is utterly outlandish as it mixes black humour with some fantasy and horror elements.I'd like to spend some time in Litan among crowds of masked weirdos.I have seen other French surreal horror movies from early 80's like "Devil Story" or inept "Mad Mutilator",but "Litan" wipes the floor with these two.8 out of 10.
There is no movie like Litan
mapoussi30 June 2002
This is probably the best movie from Mocky. There is his weird humor, a fantastic story. The images are also something you can't forget. I'm just waiting to find it on DVD, in a few hundred years. I would even settle for the VHS.
Bewitching, unclassifiable, and terrifyingly beautiful..!!
samxxxul9 July 2020
1 more month until the first death anniversary of the legendary Mocky, it's been a year already and just 3 days back was his birthday. I decided to revisit my favourite films of Mocky and "Litan" will be the best followed by "Love Hate." This movie is a surreal Gallic folk-horror fantasy set during a peculiar town's Festival of the Dead in the city of Litan which works as a cross genre hybrid like one-part Lovecraft one-part Jean Rollin/ Alain Robbe-Grillet. A couple is on vacation where the traditional mask festival is taking honoring the dead like Mexico's "Día de Muertos." But soon it can be observed that there are numerous deaths among the inhabitants, behind which there appears to be a mysterious power. Meanwhile, a premonitory nightmare, mysterious disappearances and the inhabitants begin to act more and more strangely. The mist-shrouded passages give it a Wicker Man-meets-Don't Look Now atmosphere. Director Jean-Pierre Mocky has showed a good eye for atmospheric pictures and sceneries Amidst doing the role of Jock in the film. The swift editing, the pig masks, the Nietzschean metaphor avoiding intrusive showmanship in favor of subtle surrealism is also the highlights of the film. You will experience a highly unusual film, which also reveals once again what diverse cinema is commonly referred to as "horror", with "Litan" so much more than just "just" a horror film. The movie does not step too deep into "the usual" horror tropes and what is going on in "LITAN" is impossible to describe in words, you must look at it yourself. Highly Recommended for the fans of Harry Kümel's Malpertuis (1971), Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (1975), Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981), and Janusz Majewski's Lokis (1970). RIP Jean-Pierre Mocky.
A dream
BandSAboutMovies24 October 2023
Warning: Spoilers
This may not be the type of movie that will thrill an audience with jump scares or play well at a Halloween party. It is, however, a movie that has some frightening moments within it and images that have stayed with me longer than the latest elevated horror movie that I have been promised will keep me awake at night and dominate my thoughts. That never happens with those movies. It has with Litan.
This is a movie that depends on what you see more than what the film tells you. In that you will be the judge if what you see is in the minds of the characters, if the magic is real, and if these moments are happening. Even the title takes a bit of thought, as a litany is a form of prayer, usually spoken by a priest, in which the celebrant makes spoken petitions to a higher being and the followers answer with a fixed response. If you've been to a Catholic Church, there are six approved litanies, and most are answered with "Lord have mercy on us."
Your enjoyment of this film will also depend on your willingness to accept things like faith and that there could be something beyond all this, even if some of the characters directly state that they have no belief. This film is at once a fantastique - the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative - and a juxtaposition of that concept.
But, hey - let's stop using college words and talk about the movie.
Nora (Marie-José Nat) has a premonition that shocks her out of her ordinary life and sends her into the streets of Litan, a village amid a Festival of the Dead. Yet, this isn't a co-opted Pagan rite-turned-commercial. Things just feel off. Way off. As she seeks her husband, Jock (director and writer Jean-Pierre Mocky), she encounters people dressed as clowns and animals, all as silver masked men who look like Fantomas by way of Destro keep on playing music.
Jock is in this town to excavate something. The kind of something that unleashes lightning snakes that make their way into the water supply, causing some to fade away literally and others to become catatonic. Others just start killing everyone else.
Nora keeps searching for him through cobblestone alleys and narrow hallways and everywhere she goes, that dream is still calling to her.
As for those electrical beings, Dr. Steve Julien (Nino Ferrer) seems to know what they are, and he isn't telling anyone.
It all feels like "The Prisoner" trapped in the mountains of the religious backwoods of Don't Torture A Duckling by way of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and a hospital that is very Let Sleeping Corpses Lie - if his temperament is any indication, Commissioner Bolek (Roger Lumont) must have gone to police academy with Arthur Kennedy's character - but these are only touchstones that I've put along the way for myself because this is so much its own trip that you need something to guide you back.
There are many kinds of movie lovers, but for the sake of this argument, there are two. In the oddest moments of Inferno, when Argento seems to be making it all up literally as he's filming or perhaps is capturing another reality that he barely comprehends, some people grow frustrated by the utter lack of story and the constant shifts. And some grow excited by it.
If you are the latter - I hope you are - you're the right person to come to Litan.
Also: if you believe in lucid dreaming, yet also understand that dreams are like rapids that we can't ford across in our boats of limited human understanding, you will also find something here.
Also also: If you are on the right side of the "artist versus hack" arguments regarding the works of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco, you'll also feel that warm blanket feeling of droning doom here.
Why does Nora see Jock covered in blood as coffins float down rivers and bodies fall from the sky?
What happened to Eric (Terence Montagne) and why is he hooked up to the machines of Dr. Julien? Eric also unleashes perhaps the most ferocious dialogue in the film, telling us, "We're dreaming your life and when the dream stops, you die."
Why is the score - by Ferrer, yes, the same person playing the doctor - shift from 80s Eurohorror ala Goblin to synth to whatever those metal-faced people are playing, which is the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich?
Jock asks Nora at one point, "If God exists, what difference does it make if you're alive or dead?" In the middle of a festival celebrating death, two people are trying to get out of town alive. But they're not real, they're just characters in a film, but even so, can we learn from them? Shouldn't we try to get out alive and stop obsessing about death, which looms in every frame of this as skulls appear every few seconds just at the edges of the frame?
I read one breakdown of this movie that claims that its wild swings emulate old movie serials, where each episode ended in the sure death of its protagonists only for it to all be solved the next week. There's that. There are echoes of Jodorowsky, of when Fulci stops caring about the plot and gets absolute and when the drugs kick in too.
What does it all mean?
Does it have to mean anything?
Seeing as how this is running in the month of Halloween, I have to confess that this movie won't be spooky for everyone. Yet, I've been obsessed by age as of late, by life change, by legacy. I don't know if it even matters sometimes. What matters? I'm not sure. I just know that movies make me feel things, deep and meaningful things, and this movie brought me a flood of joy and as there's a dearth of that in this current timeline, I wanted to share it with you.
This is a movie that depends on what you see more than what the film tells you. In that you will be the judge if what you see is in the minds of the characters, if the magic is real, and if these moments are happening. Even the title takes a bit of thought, as a litany is a form of prayer, usually spoken by a priest, in which the celebrant makes spoken petitions to a higher being and the followers answer with a fixed response. If you've been to a Catholic Church, there are six approved litanies, and most are answered with "Lord have mercy on us."
Your enjoyment of this film will also depend on your willingness to accept things like faith and that there could be something beyond all this, even if some of the characters directly state that they have no belief. This film is at once a fantastique - the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative - and a juxtaposition of that concept.
But, hey - let's stop using college words and talk about the movie.
Nora (Marie-José Nat) has a premonition that shocks her out of her ordinary life and sends her into the streets of Litan, a village amid a Festival of the Dead. Yet, this isn't a co-opted Pagan rite-turned-commercial. Things just feel off. Way off. As she seeks her husband, Jock (director and writer Jean-Pierre Mocky), she encounters people dressed as clowns and animals, all as silver masked men who look like Fantomas by way of Destro keep on playing music.
Jock is in this town to excavate something. The kind of something that unleashes lightning snakes that make their way into the water supply, causing some to fade away literally and others to become catatonic. Others just start killing everyone else.
Nora keeps searching for him through cobblestone alleys and narrow hallways and everywhere she goes, that dream is still calling to her.
As for those electrical beings, Dr. Steve Julien (Nino Ferrer) seems to know what they are, and he isn't telling anyone.
It all feels like "The Prisoner" trapped in the mountains of the religious backwoods of Don't Torture A Duckling by way of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and a hospital that is very Let Sleeping Corpses Lie - if his temperament is any indication, Commissioner Bolek (Roger Lumont) must have gone to police academy with Arthur Kennedy's character - but these are only touchstones that I've put along the way for myself because this is so much its own trip that you need something to guide you back.
There are many kinds of movie lovers, but for the sake of this argument, there are two. In the oddest moments of Inferno, when Argento seems to be making it all up literally as he's filming or perhaps is capturing another reality that he barely comprehends, some people grow frustrated by the utter lack of story and the constant shifts. And some grow excited by it.
If you are the latter - I hope you are - you're the right person to come to Litan.
Also: if you believe in lucid dreaming, yet also understand that dreams are like rapids that we can't ford across in our boats of limited human understanding, you will also find something here.
Also also: If you are on the right side of the "artist versus hack" arguments regarding the works of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco, you'll also feel that warm blanket feeling of droning doom here.
Why does Nora see Jock covered in blood as coffins float down rivers and bodies fall from the sky?
What happened to Eric (Terence Montagne) and why is he hooked up to the machines of Dr. Julien? Eric also unleashes perhaps the most ferocious dialogue in the film, telling us, "We're dreaming your life and when the dream stops, you die."
Why is the score - by Ferrer, yes, the same person playing the doctor - shift from 80s Eurohorror ala Goblin to synth to whatever those metal-faced people are playing, which is the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich?
Jock asks Nora at one point, "If God exists, what difference does it make if you're alive or dead?" In the middle of a festival celebrating death, two people are trying to get out of town alive. But they're not real, they're just characters in a film, but even so, can we learn from them? Shouldn't we try to get out alive and stop obsessing about death, which looms in every frame of this as skulls appear every few seconds just at the edges of the frame?
I read one breakdown of this movie that claims that its wild swings emulate old movie serials, where each episode ended in the sure death of its protagonists only for it to all be solved the next week. There's that. There are echoes of Jodorowsky, of when Fulci stops caring about the plot and gets absolute and when the drugs kick in too.
What does it all mean?
Does it have to mean anything?
Seeing as how this is running in the month of Halloween, I have to confess that this movie won't be spooky for everyone. Yet, I've been obsessed by age as of late, by life change, by legacy. I don't know if it even matters sometimes. What matters? I'm not sure. I just know that movies make me feel things, deep and meaningful things, and this movie brought me a flood of joy and as there's a dearth of that in this current timeline, I wanted to share it with you.
Carnival of sorts.
dbdumonteil29 September 2016
A maverick of the French cinema ,Mocky is an acquired taste indeed;he retains a small but strong cult over here.
It was not the first time he had tackled the fantasy and horror genre :in the sixties,his fans remember "La Grande Frousse" ,from Jean Ray's "La Cité De L'Indicible Peur".
"Litan " was awarded the critics prize at the Festival D'Avoriaz ,but reportedly booed in the theater;it was a big flop at the box office :anyway ,Mocky's approach is too oblique to gain a wide popular audience.
"Litan" is more painstaking than usual:here Mocky really creates an atmosphere ,with impressive pictures:probably influenced by the fetes he attended when he was a child in the east of France ;the movie begins with a nightmare and ....continues in a nightmarish area ,in The village of Litan (the spelling of which is close to that of Lithan ,spirit of evil);in fact,Nora is the only person in the whole movie to find the village she moves in eerie,maleficent,and threatening.Even her partner Jock tries to communicate,to react to events whereas she almost never does.That's why I sometimes wonder whether everything does not take place in her mind and/or whether she has gone crazy ...because Jock might be dead ,and as they sail on the subterranean river (the Styx?),both in the same coffin (which might remind one of Hergé whose dreamlike pictures are disturbing in" TinTin and Les Cigares Du Pharaon" ).The last sequence -the only one which is not pagan- shows Nora ,in mourning ,and in her eye ,we can spot a "vision" of her (lost?) love .
You have to search your memory to find something vaguely close to "Litan" :apart from Mocky's movie I mention above,we can feel,perhaps,some influence of indie American works such as "carnival of souls" or " seconds" and of his French peers' weirdest efforts ,stuff such as Chabrol's "Alice Ou La Dernière Fugue " and Malle's "black moon" .
The nightmare scene is particularly successful ,with these masked figures,this man standing on a wire with a motorcycle,and this sinister-looking guy who's doing a very strange work;these elements reappear as Nora's fear increases .
Marie-José Nat is ideally cast as this woman lost in a world she does not understand;Nino Ferrer,cast as the head of a research center,wrote a baroque ,but effective score which enhances this strange feast in this heathen town.
For all that,in spite of pictures which can put the viewer into a trance ,or at least mesmerize him,"Litan" ,in some respects ,is a botched job ,the weakest link being ,as it is too often the case with this director ,a desultory screenplay ;hence the commercial failure .
Although not accessible enough,"Litan" is part of the handful of Mocky's movies you should watch.
It was not the first time he had tackled the fantasy and horror genre :in the sixties,his fans remember "La Grande Frousse" ,from Jean Ray's "La Cité De L'Indicible Peur".
"Litan " was awarded the critics prize at the Festival D'Avoriaz ,but reportedly booed in the theater;it was a big flop at the box office :anyway ,Mocky's approach is too oblique to gain a wide popular audience.
"Litan" is more painstaking than usual:here Mocky really creates an atmosphere ,with impressive pictures:probably influenced by the fetes he attended when he was a child in the east of France ;the movie begins with a nightmare and ....continues in a nightmarish area ,in The village of Litan (the spelling of which is close to that of Lithan ,spirit of evil);in fact,Nora is the only person in the whole movie to find the village she moves in eerie,maleficent,and threatening.Even her partner Jock tries to communicate,to react to events whereas she almost never does.That's why I sometimes wonder whether everything does not take place in her mind and/or whether she has gone crazy ...because Jock might be dead ,and as they sail on the subterranean river (the Styx?),both in the same coffin (which might remind one of Hergé whose dreamlike pictures are disturbing in" TinTin and Les Cigares Du Pharaon" ).The last sequence -the only one which is not pagan- shows Nora ,in mourning ,and in her eye ,we can spot a "vision" of her (lost?) love .
You have to search your memory to find something vaguely close to "Litan" :apart from Mocky's movie I mention above,we can feel,perhaps,some influence of indie American works such as "carnival of souls" or " seconds" and of his French peers' weirdest efforts ,stuff such as Chabrol's "Alice Ou La Dernière Fugue " and Malle's "black moon" .
The nightmare scene is particularly successful ,with these masked figures,this man standing on a wire with a motorcycle,and this sinister-looking guy who's doing a very strange work;these elements reappear as Nora's fear increases .
Marie-José Nat is ideally cast as this woman lost in a world she does not understand;Nino Ferrer,cast as the head of a research center,wrote a baroque ,but effective score which enhances this strange feast in this heathen town.
For all that,in spite of pictures which can put the viewer into a trance ,or at least mesmerize him,"Litan" ,in some respects ,is a botched job ,the weakest link being ,as it is too often the case with this director ,a desultory screenplay ;hence the commercial failure .
Although not accessible enough,"Litan" is part of the handful of Mocky's movies you should watch.
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