The Iron Rose
A film whose plot can be summed up in six words two people get lost in a cemetary Jean Rollin's The Iron Rose is as alternative a movie going experience as you can get, the two main characters meet at a wedding and go cycling around a lonely rail depot before deciding to picnic in an overcrowded cemetary, lost in their own little world night falls and they find themselves locked in for the midnight hours, succumbing to their own fears and doubts they stumble around the tombstones searching for a way out. With only snatches of mainly dreamlike, poetic dialogue and occasional musical interludes, Rollin uses the graves and the faces of his leads to tell the story. A hugely personal film for Jean, the film was laughed off screen at it's premiere and languished without distribution for a while, with the benfit of time, the film now is a perfect example of Rollin's style and themes, his films will never win a contest with Speilberg or Scorcese in terms of technical brilliance or sheer popcorn excitement, but no other film maker can for me capture as well cinematically the idea of an emotion, the feeling of living in a dream, of letting yourself go and seeing more than you see with your eyes in a world of infinite possibilities and make the banal seem like a sonnet. Rollin's doomed characters may not like what is happening to them, but they embrace to reality of it as if it were their destiny to be there all along. Rollin's death at the end of last year left a hole in my own particular appreciation of cinema, a truly original brave film maker whose work transcended genre to enter a place where dream and nightmare collide in a collage of terrifying beauty. Je vous salue Jean!
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