The Iron Rose

A Rose of Iron.

****/*****

Essentially, I would say The Iron Rose (1973)is about a guy and girl locking eyes at some insignificant party (well, not to those who were married, but to the plot itself it is just a place where they encounter each other), are passionately in lust with each other, decide to take off, find a place to have a picnic after some necking, and fall victim to the location of said picnic. Well, the guy is okay for the most part, although fucking a girl in a pit of skeleton bones does call into question his taste (although, she’s a feast for the eyes, so maybe you get lost in the moment…), but the girl “loses herself to the place”. She basically somehow falls victim to the cemetery, and its imprint is left on her to the point that the decadence and representation of death that it entails is poetically important to her psyche. I try to explain her “descent” (or in her mania, an “ascent”) and reading this I kind of understand why The Iron Rose would be considered a bit of 80 minute lunacy. Yet I find myself often entranced by the film. Or maybe the girl herself leaves me transfixed.

 

Just the chance to shoot almost an entire film in a cemetery (the shots of a town with elderly buildings at the point of crumbling and seemingly held together with glue and duck tape and the “retired” train are just as decadent and “dead”), Rollin doesn’t pass up such an opportunity. And have the girl teasing the guy and giving him a little incentive to continue chasing her.

Françoise Pascal and Hugues Quester walking the cemetery.

Death is presented as beautiful and sad. The clown visiting the grave. The vampire re-entering his tomb. The figures that show up in the cemetery seem to indicate the unfortunate nature of death and what it does to us. The girl, once the place “takes its hold” on her, accepts death as something far more substantial and alluring. What she does to the guy is rather horrifying. She doesn’t think so, but I place myself in his position (although I wouldn’t be going down into an underground mausoleum with a door that can lock me in, especially after the girl shows signs of mental decline) and such a fate disturbed me significantly. That and forgotten (how will anyone know he wound up there because the girl is the one who knows of his location in the cemetery); the guy remains in a mausoleum and no one he might know will be able to find him.

 

Françoise Pascal and Hugues Quester were not alone at this cemetery. Some others were as well.

 

 

Then the girl parades around the place (and in Rollin’s favorite beach) in a state of blissful mania. She no longer embraces life, but acknowledges how death is far more appetizing and “real” to her.

Weird movie, but yet it has this whole thing going that brings me back to it. The beauty and the cemetery (which is an amazingly gothic place)…this could be it.