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Apparently, Isabelle (Ovidie) has inherited the mansion of her cousin
Michel Gent, a filmmaker she hardly knew. But when she wants to visit his
tomb at the cemetary, she instead finds all sorts of phantoms from Gent's
body of work, all figments of his imagination that suggest he might still
be alive - but maybe not in the conventional form. At the mansion, the
housekeeper gives her a tour of the place that is littered with books and
objects that have influenced Michel Gent, mostly from the realm of pulp
and surrealism ... and for some reason, there are grandfather's clocks
almost everywhere, and some of them even seem inhabited (!). Somehow,
Isabelle is drawn into a grandfather's clock, that weirdly enough is the
gateway to another part of the mansion, one that is littered with
mannequins representing bizarrely mutilated human bodies. The phantoms
from Michel Gent's films though continue to haunt Isabelle, and led by the
housekeeper, they become increasingly menacing. Eventually though,
Isabelle makes it back to her room, where she meets one of Gent's regular
actresses, an eccentric old woman, and finally Gent himself, who emerges
from (where else?) a grandfather's clock. He invites Isabelle to come with
him to the land between life and death, but she outright refuses, instead
throws that particular grandfather's clock out of the house. The
housekeeper ridicules her, and as if to prove there is nothing wrong with
the clock, that it's nothing but a clock, she enters it - and does not
disappear - but now Isabelle douses it in petrol and sets it afire (and
the housekeeper with it) to put an end to the horror. Above all
else, this film by Jean Rollin is an hommage - to himself, his influences,
to his body of
work, and thus it includes excerpts from all his best filmsr, features many Rollin regulars and elements from his former films
(especially of course grandfather clocks doubling as gateways, and
labyrinthine mansions and cemetaries to mirror his labyrinthine plots),
and even the name of the elusive filmmaker himself, Michel Gent, is an
allusion to Rollins full name, Jean Michel Rollin le Gentil (and it also
has to be noted that Rollin shot most of his pornographic films as Michel Gentil). Yet
while it might be somehow charming to spot the references to Rollin's body
of work as well as his influences, La Nuit des Horloges is not a
terribly good film, it seems that just like Isabelle is looking for her
filmmaker-cousin, Rollin is looking for a plot. Sure, his films
have always been sketchy, storywise, but usually they still seemed to be
made from one coherent piece of vision - not so here, where the plot seems
to be little more than a travelogue through his better films, with all of
the key elements thrown into this one just to please Rollin-fans, yet without much
rhyme or reason. And there's another problem with this film: It's awfully
talky (at least by Jean Rollin-standards), and dialogue has never been
Rollin's strong point (which is why there is so little of it in his films
so far). That all said, La Nuit des Horloges is not a total
failure, at least at times Rollin demonstrates he hasn't forgotten how to
bring morbid and poetic images to the screen, and goes further in terms of
surrealism than ever before, but to be quite honest, if you are not
familiar with Rollin's work, which this is an hommage to, you will simply
not get the film, and if you are, you will love parts of it but as a whole
still be somewhat disappointed.
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find Night of the Clocks at adultvideouniverse.com
