This is both an untypical and a typical Jean Rollin film. Rollin’s name is indelibly linked with erotic horror films but the eroticism is very muted in The Iron Rose and there are absolutely none of the ingredients one associates with horror films. No blood, no gore, no killings, no vampires, no zombies, no monsters, no ghosts. Most people would hardly call this a horror movie.
There’s also little of the overt surrealism that one associates with Rollin. This is a very low-key film and while there’s certainly plenty of strangeness here it’s a very subtle sort of strangeness.
On the other hand this movie is still pure Jean Rollin. The tone, the mood, the visual approach, the very soul of the film is Rollinism to an extreme degree. On the rare occasions in this part of his career that Rollin departed from the erotic horror genre (in movies such as this and the underrated The Escapees) he still managed to make movies that are clearly cut from the same cloth as his vampire movies.
And there are plenty of Rollin trademarks here - there’s that beach which he loved so much and which features in so many of his movies. There’s a clown. And you expect clocks and time to feature in a Rollin movie and in this one a wrist-watch plays a vital rôle and time is certainly crucial.
Rollin intended this to be a minimalist sort of movie. There are very very brief appearance by other characters but for almost the entire running time there are just two characters, The Man and The Woman. And to an overwhelming degree the film is focused on The Woman. This clearly meant expecting a lot from the young actress playing that character, Françoise Pascal, but she delivers the goods. It’s a stunning performance and very finely judged - she knows just how far to push things. After being cast in the film Françoise Pascal did a lot of research on the subject of madness and she manages the girl’s growing detachment from the world of the real and the living quite convincingly.
The plot is also incredibly simple. The Man meets The Woman at a wedding. They arrange to meet the following day. Now if you’ve just met a girl and you’re attracted to her you naturally want to pick a romantic spot for your first date and he has just the place in mind - the local cemetery. And what girl could fail to be put in an amorous mood by the idea of making love in a crypt? Of course when you’re making love you tend to lose track of time and when they emerge from the crypt night has fallen. And finding their way back to the entrance gate to the cemetery proves to be quite a challenge. They are soon hopelessly lost.
The man reacts as you might expect. He gets frustrated and angry and takes it out on the girl. The girl reacts very differently. And that’s when the strangeness starts to kick in.
The guy is hopelessly out of his depth. Perhaps he was out of his depth the moment he met this girl. When your idea of a technique for picking up girls is to recite poems about death to them you might want to stop to ask yourself whether the kind of girl on whom this technique works is really the kind of girl you want as a girlfriend. And if she gets really turned on by the idea of making love in an open grave filled with skeletons you really might want to think twice about her as a serious relationship prospect.
The movie was shot almost entirely on location, and at night, in the cemetery at Amiens. It’s an amazing location, beautiful in a strange macabre way. It’s a perfect setting for a girl who falls in love with death. There’s some brief nudity. The sex scenes are not even remotely graphic, in fact they’re PG stuff. There is eroticism here though. It’s a very unhealthy eroticism but it’s all-pervasive. There’s also love, and the search for eternal love, but the love is pretty unhealthy as well.
As to whether the girl is mad or not she’s certainly mad by most people’s standards but perhaps she has been given a glimpse into truths that most of us cannot deal with (and which she arguably cannot deal with either). Perhaps madness and truth are one and the same thing. Of course there’s always the possibility that she has become possessed by the spirits of the dead although there are no overt hints of the supernatural.
The Redemption Blu-Ray is a huge improvement on their early DVD release. The transfer is anamorphic and the images look suitably mysterious and gothic but not quite threatening. Almost seductive. There are a few extras including a lengthy interview with Françoise Pascal (whose enthusiasm for this movie knows no bounds) and a fine essay on Rollin by Tim Lucas.
The Iron Rose is a poetic and metaphysical musing on life and death and the boundaries between the two. As a horror film it’s not particularly scary (unless like me you’re terrified of being lost at night) but it does deal with the nature of fear, and the seductive and erotic nature of fear and death. It was his most personal film up to that time (it was his fifth feature) and he ignored commercial considerations completely, which unfortunately cost the film dearly at the box office. It’s also one of Rollin’s masterpieces. Very highly recommended.
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