Taking a well-earned break from their studies in the countryside beautiful students Françoise and Anna (Mireille Saunin and Michéle Perello) soon attract the attention of Gurth (Alfred Baillou – I must confess I thought it was Michele Lemoine at first), hunchbacked dwarf servant of Morgana Le Fay, who lures them into his mistresses' magical domain.
There the immortal sorceress (Dominique Delpierre) presents the pair with a choice: Either stay here with her and enjoy an eternity of sapphic delights with her other handmaidens, or be condemned to the dungeon for the rest of their natural lives…
The difficulty the fantastique film has always faced is that of finding its audience, being too difficult and idiosyncratic for the horror masses yet insufficiently respectable for the art film elite.
This obscure 1970 entry by first-time feature director Bruno Gantillon, only 26 years old at the time, is a case in point. Light on horror with the exception of an admittedly commercially-minded pre-credits torture sequence but exceptionally strong on dreamlike atmosphere and erotic frissons, it's reminiscent of a rural counterpart to Jacques Rivette's Paris-set Céline et Julie vont en bateau . But because it lacks that film's respectable credentials it will probably never get the attention it merits from critics unwilling to look beyond the comfortable confines of the nouvelle vague and its successors.
It isn't through want of trying, with Gantillon expertly establishing la règle du jeu at the outset as our two heroines discuss their plans for the future, one aspiring to be a bande dessinée artist.
As with, for example, Jesus Franco's La Comtesse Perverse – where Lina Romay's characters' pulp fictions segue into the filmmaker's reinterpretation of The Most Dangerous Game – we're thus set up to see a hunchbacked dwarf in quasi-medieval garb or a boat that crosses a lake off its own volition to an island where a castle and damsels in diaphanous candy-coloured gowns await as nothing particularly out of the ordinary.
If the majority might have declined to cross this threshold and accept the call to adventure with Françoise and Anna at least Gantillon can also still take pride in the company he's thereby keeping, his film standing with the likes of countryman Jean Rollin's Le Viol du vampire in stylistics and sensibility as a piece of surrealist and serial inspired pop-pulp, light and playful yet with a more serious, meaningful, side.
In particular, how are we supposed to view Morgana's domain and the young womens responses to her seductions? Is this place where men – other than compromised "little man" Ganth – have no place an expression of a dream or a nightmare? Is it a utopia or dystopia? In terms of whose gender, sexual orientation and practices? What is this depiction of a sisterhood of girl slaves marked by rivalries and jealousies and their absolute ruler demanding unquestioning obedience actually saying?
About the only thing we can be sure of is that someone, somewhere will undoubtedly take objection to Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay 's plentiful displays of beautiful female flesh and tastefully handled sapphistry as inappropriate visual pleasures.
But, in the end, perhaps this and more mainstream acceptance really don't matter: What better, given its subject matter, than for the magical Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay to work its charms on an appreciative cult audience?
At the risk of sounding like a stuck dansette disque, this is another essential release from Mondo Macabro.
Other than some blockiness in the nighttime scenes, the anamorphic widescreen transfer, framed in the original aspect ratio of 1.66:1, is well-nigh perfect with astonishing levels of detail and vibrant colours to bring the most out of every fetishistic texture, be it skin, hair or the form beneath a gossamer slip. ("She threw something on and nearly missed," as the old gag goes.)
The stereo audio showcases the gentle, near-ambient score to particularly good effect without ever overwhelming it in the manner a more extensive remix could have, while the optional English subtitles – a new translation by Pete Tombs – are clear and easy to read.
The extras package, meanwhile, once more showcases the company's willingness to go the extra mile: Nothing so unusual about including two deleted scenes from the vaults but to also source a third from an video of an Italian TV broadcast – where do they find these things?
Also among the finds are the film's French trailer, selling the hot lesbian action by way of poet Charles Baudelaire no less, and Gantillon's 1967 short Un Couple des artistes , running 13 minutes. A droll little piece seemingly inspired by Les Yeux sans visage and House of Wax , it sees a naive young woman take up a job as maid to a benign-seeming Paris couple and winding up as a museum mannequin.
A ten minute interview with Gantillon, speaking in English and coming across as a thoroughly nice guy, explores his background and that of the film: Reacting to his staid bourgeois upbringing, he learned the craft of filmmaking during military service and found a job on the innovative TV magazine show Dim Dum Dom. Having made Un Couple, he was reluctant to go through the conventional route to a feature via other calling cards – and rightly so, one feels, the short showing a prodigious talent almost fully formed – and somehow managed to convince his backers to support Morgane.
Surprisingly in terms of how right he feels it also emerges that Alfred Baillou's dwarf wasn't part of the original concept with Gantillon rightfully wary that introducing a male presence to Morgana's feminine realm could destroy the atmosphere. The director also talks of the difficulties in finding actors comfortable with nudity; the pregnant Dominique Delpierre's fears that Baillou's presence would somehow cause her to lose her charge, and other fascinating tidbits.
Also included are an in-depth essay by Pete Tombs, again looking at the film's production history and nicely filling in any gaps thereby and a set of informative, well-written bios that go way beyond IMDB copy and paste jobs: We learn that composer Cisco el Rubio turns out to be a pseudonym for prolific soundtrack man Francois de Roubiax and that Gantillon and Michéle Perello took decidedly different trajectories as as softcore segued into hardcore by the mid-1970s, the actress going with the flow and the director – "Less is more – always" – reluctantly turning back to television productions. Appropriately, insofar as it functions as a character in its own right, a gallery of the Chateau de Val as it is today is also featured among these characters.
One of the Eurocult discs of the year, surely.
Some linkage:
(External)
Mondo Macabro DVD
(External)
A nice Girl Slaves gallery
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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