Night of the Hunted

La nuit des traquées

I look at you…you are there in front of me. We belong to this world. The only one that exists for me. The world of the present moment. Please don’t leave. You are the only memory I have right now.

Who is Elisabet? And where did she “escape” from? Picked up by a stranger, a motorist who damn near runs her over with his car, Elisabet, in a gown with no memory of where she belongs or lives, decides to ride with him into Paris. People are following them, needing to get Elisabet back. Is she important to some people? Oh, and who was that red-headed naked chick beckoning for Elisabet, left to her own devices?

Elisabet’s memory comes and goes. Details as quick as seconds vanish, yet she can remember a girl named Veronique (the naked chick?) and not even her own name. She goes on and on about how her mind is blank, and her new friend, desperately desiring to help her, gets so frustrated he shakes her in some impulsive attempt to perhaps rattle some remembrance into her, soon realizing it’s no use.

Move within me. Gently.

Look at me so you will never forget me.

There is a prolonged, very erotic, and passionate sexual encounter between Elisabet and Robert, utilizing her amnesia problem for extra motivation in making the entire experience extra potent. I have to say that Brigitte Lahaie in this movie cast a spell of arousal over me that was quite palpable. What an incredibly sensual and desirable woman. She totally loses herself in this scene, as if her character had become enraptured, just letting go and accepting Robert’s embrace.

To say I'm a little transfixed with Dominique Journet would be an understatement

Stay inside me. Again. I will never forget you. It’s impossible. Look at me. I want to die with each breath so I will never forget you.

But Elisabet does and her doctor (and his assistant) insist she return with them to the hospital. When returned to the hospital, stuck in a room (oh, but not against her will, though, as the doc is always certain to remind her) with another aloof patient named Catherine who suffers the same amnesia-constant memory loss problem. Seems the doc is helping to gradually restore memory function. Catherine’s so bad she has a hard time remembering to use her spoon to scoop up some lobster soup. An older female patient complains to Elisabet about not knowing what happened in her whole past, as if all her life was wiped from the brain with a stroke of a brush.

The tragedy of not knowing who you are, your identity, your past, it is all laid out here by director Jean Rollin, as we see these blank faces and bewildered eyes, trying hungrily to summon any memory at all that might give them an indication, just a whiff of a past memory that might provide a clue as to their name, a loved one, some detail of an event or spark of history. Catherine likes to make up details about a possible past, as if make-believe, if just to soothe their tormented souls (“Even if it’s false, it’s true.”). Catherine even has a hard time getting her dress off.

I think this is a sad era of films for Rollin. Living Dead Girl, made around the same time, also has a sense of tragedy running through it. When Catherine believes Elisabet has left her and will never return due to forgetfulness, she puts a pair of scissors in her eyes, gouging them in suicide. This is Rollin at his darkest period to me. Catherine’s body laid out as Elisabet mourns her loss; this was really eerie to me. Veronique proposes her own theory: stuck inside their long tower, patients are the victim of Dr. Francis who may be causing their memory “disease”. A second attempt at escape may be their only option.

When the night comes, all that’s left is the anxiety for those who are lost in the world of the tower blocks.

Later one of the *zombies* stuck in the hospital has went from anxiety-stricken to homicidal, bashing the head in of an orderly (once a patient who claims to have memories that remain, taking sexual advantage of female memory-loss patients), telling another patient that he pleads for no more injections, no more drugs. He later strangles her while they are having sex in the swimming dress area.

You can’t escape from the black tower that easily.

When the patients’ brains are “emptied”, devoid of what made them human, denied their individuality, their identity, Dr. Francis considers them *dead*. What I like about Night of the Hunted is that Dr Francis and his assistant, Solange, inform Robert that there’s a reason by what looks like sinister science, explaining the homicidal reactions that seem to spurn from anxiety attacks which might (or might not) be the answer as to everything so strange and odd that occurred to the patients in the hospital. It is for us to decide how accurate or inaccurate this diagnosis is. Are the brain cells dying because of a strange illness or Dr. Francis’ own experiments?

Rollin establishes once again his attraction to train cars (Iron Rose shows this, also), with the conclusion set at a sleepy station where the patients are herded together like lifeless walking corpses. I think his film casts enough doubt towards Francis just in the way this character is so cold and emotionless, not much more alive than his patients. Solange is the same way as Francis. One scene shows one of the patients taken out of the train car, moved to a little room, injected with a liquid drug in a hypodermic, stretchered to a crematorium, and burned. Is this to get rid of evidence of their experiments or to keep this supposed epidemic from infecting others?

Interesting to me, since the other explanation to Robert from Francis was presented, is how we are just prone to hope (unless you just don’t) for those imprisoned (that seem innocent victims held captive against their will) to escape the captivity for freedom, but then we are asked if these very characters (preferably Elisabet and Veronique) should be able to roam about unabated.

For some reason, I didn’t find anything that remotely interesting upon my first viewing of Night of the Hunted, but I found it quite fascinating and compelling this time around. I guess, though, Rollin will always be judged by his pace and resistance towards moving the story along at a quicker pace. He isn’t Godard, and it’s clear he’d prefer to let Elisabet and Veronique walk all the way down a hall in an extended take than cut through all this “unnecessary excess” and get on with it. I think Rollin cares about the backdrop, the location that exists around the characters. A cemetery (or, in this movie’s case, the long tall towers) is just as much a character (yeah, I know, I’m getting all “Roger Ebert analytical”, but it is what interests me) as Elisabet.

But I’m not of that group that believes he doesn’t care about the characters as much as the composition of their setting. I think Night of the Hunted proves Rollin indeed places an emphasis on the plight of his characters, their terrible situation, and how they are so disposed of, like diseased cattle. I think those that say Rollin thinks nothing about characterization is ludicrous as seen when the crematorium docs can see that Veronique is flashing back to when her and Elisabet were walking together in a park, jovial with life ahead of them, letting her go. She could just leave but instead returns to the car to get Elisabet, is spotted by one of the gun-toting goons in charge of keeping them held captive, shooting the young lady in cold blood (a smile on his face), as she stumbles with the last remaining life within her. 

There’s another scene, the very end, where Dr. Francis is convinced he must stop Robert from taking Elisabet into Paris alive, shoots him, yet allows the two to walk onward, knowing both are “dead”. Holding hands as their walk becomes troubled by their conditions, the screen fades to black, and Rollin further establishes himself as a dark romantic at heart. He allows them to walk together even though they’ll not be doing so for long.

Rollin allows Francis to spell the whole reason behind the illness--the whole radiation from power plant that infected anyone in the area idea--and on this we get our reason why he must shoot Robert and keep Elisabet from re-entering society. This is just provided to accompany his vision of the characters, the black tower, and tragedy of unrequited love denied by a fatal illness.