Nuits rouges

Nuits
rouges

With Nuits rouges, Georges
Franju returned to the territory of Louis Feuillade, whose adventure
serials also provided the inspiration for Franju's 1963 Judex.
Made a decade later, Nuits rouges is far wilder, more garish
and absurd, than its predecessor: if Franju's Judex captured
the mystery and poetic magic of Feuillade, this later tribute is all
about the pulpy delights of Feuillade, the over-the-top pleasures of a
ludicrous, convoluted narrative, secret conspiracies, spies and killers
in stylized costumes. The narrative revolves around the mythical
treasure of the Templars, a secret long guarded by this secret society
and coveted by all others who suspect its existence. The nameless master
criminal (Jacques Champreux) known only as "the man without a face" is
one of those who seek this treasure, and is willing to do anything to
get it. He is a master of disguise (even if many of his disguises, in
the grand tradition of movie disguise masters, consist of nothing but a
cheap wig or a false nose) and often appears in a sleek black suit and
red mask, behind which his eyes are insane and unblinking.

Quite
frankly, this movie is nuts. The elusive Templar treasure provides a
(slim) justification for one loony set piece after another, as the
red-masked villain's secret criminal organization squares off against
the Templars in their white robes and masks. The film was edited down
from an eight-episode television miniseries, which presumably made more
sense in terms of narrative, but here Franju has distilled the story
down to its bare essence, one weird moment after another with little
concern for continuity. In the midst of all this scheming and spy movie
pastiche, Paul (Ugo Pagliai) gets drawn into the mystery because of his
murdered uncle, who had been safeguarding the Templars' treasure, while
police inspector Sorbier (Gert Fröbe) tries to make some sense of this
all and the "poet detective" (whatever that is) Séraphin (Patrick
Préjean) keeps bumbling along and screwing everything up. Franju's
visual imagination is in high gear throughout, spinning out a goofy,
endlessly inventive series of colorful set pieces. Thus the red-masked
criminal's lair is a cross between a sci-fi compound and a business
office. The villain marches through secret passages and sits down behind
a silvery desk — cheap and fake-looking, like it's simply been coated
in aluminum foil — but then calls his employees over the intercom like
he's paging his secretary, and asks for files. His criminal underlings
sit in neat rows at typewriters, dressed in black jumpsuits to match
their boss' outfit, though without the nifty red mask.


Franju is obviously toying with his genre
lineage here, drawing on Feuillade's black-suited spies and adventurers,
all the weird secret organizations, the rappelling along rooftops, the
strange technology that's more or less represented by cardboard boxes
and TV rabbit ears. Franju also respects another standard of the genre:
the lousy, hammy performances and awkward dubbing that infuses the film
with such a disorienting, amateurish disconnect. The multinational cast
hardly delivers any convincing performances, and some of the smaller
players are especially laughable: a professor (Henry Soskin) makes his
big death scene absolutely hysterical by squealing melodramatically as
he watches his would-be killer approach. Franju highlights the moment by
zooming in, as though his camera was going to keep probing until its
lens was engulfed by the professor's gaping, screaming maw. Franju is
obviously delighted by the inconsistent, knowingly silly performances on
display here, and he manages to make a virtue of the film's campy
self-consciousness by reveling in the unrestrained quality of it all.

Certainly,
the uneven performances are counterbalanced by the lo-fi visual beauty
of the film. Franju's sets might be minimal and deliberately,
transparently artificial, but his aesthetic sense makes them beautiful
in that knowingly fake way that so often informed the early cinema (but,
ironically, not so much Feuillade, whose films relied more on surface
realism and location shooting). At times, Franju seems to be nodding as
much to the golden age of Hollywood cinema as he is to Feuillade. A
sequence where the red-masked villain's sexy accomplice (Gayle
Hunnicutt) stalks across the rooftops in a cat burglar outfit and domino
mask is especially evocative of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief.
It has that same stylized atmosphere, the eerie darkness, the slinky
woman tiptoeing across the roofs on a mysterious mission. And when she
arrives at her destination and looks down into the room where her target
lies sleeping below, Franju switches to a shot from the other side of
the window: the woman's face hazy and distorted through the frosted
glass, her features abstracted by the distortion. Batman's nemesis
Catwoman, and comics in general, are another obvious touchstone. It all
ties back to Feuillade as the common source, the cinema's great pioneer
of pulp storytelling, the root of so many of these iconic images.


Franju also incorporates a nod to the classic
horror cinema, including his own early mad science feature Eyes
Without a Face, still probably his most famous film. The mad
scientist (Clément Harari) here is a truly deranged figure, a sinister
and wacky monster who sweats and bulges his eyes out as he operates on
his "patients." His goal? To create lobotomized robots — the ideal
common man, in his view — with no brain activity, who will do anything
they're ordered to do, and who can be used as zombie assassins. He keeps
these zombies in simple wooden coffins with nutrient drips, and rants
over them about how helpful his work will be for the future of society.
These perfect slaves will aid the economy and the military, creating a
workforce that can be stored away and turned off during periods of
downturn, without inconvenience to the world's elites and rulers, who
will alone retain their agency and minds. It's a nightmare vision, and
Franju illustrates it quite literally when an army of these zombies,
disguised as mannequins, attempt to kill Paul and Séraphin. It's a
pointed satirical jab — at the dehumanization and oppression of the
populace by elites — in a film that's otherwise concerned with being
simply a fluffy tribute to old movies and old genre tropes.

That
might seem a relatively modest goal, but Franju has so much obvious fun
with this material that Nuits rouges is a purely joyous
experience. Even more than Franju's Judex, in which he explores
the poetic resonances of this material, Nuits rouges captures
the trashy, pulpy qualities of old cinema, the bold visual ideas and the
excitement of never knowing what wild idea is coming up next.