Ménilmontant

Ménilmontant takes its name from a neighborhood in France wherein, with a shocking burst of unheard of violence (at least for the cinema of 1926) we see the bloody murder of two people, two old ghosts who went to their blood-drenched and forgotten graves, screaming. Behind them a man, the killer--but why has he done this?

Playing near a tree, its grasping cold branches reaching upward to the gray, cloud bestrewn sky, is a child, a little girl, the daughter.

Coming down the stark country lane she sees the scene of the massacre of her parents. The trauma slices into her beingness, cutting swiftly the cord that ties her to the childhood land of play, where such things never happen; to some other place, through the looking glass. Her and her orphaned sister proceed to walk through that particular glass. Who reared these orphans we do not know; we find them next walking the stark, bitter, cold cobbled streets of, we presume Paris; perhaps this is where our Ménilmontant is.

They share a stark garret room with a cold, bright view of the narrow, alley-like streets below. Long walks through the city are spied by the viewer, the cinematic aud, as the delicious, dish-like white and gray melancholy of their features is studied, as if the entire world were waiting to paint their portraits, as they teeter on the brink of a human despair few can ever understand.

A love letter leaves one of the sisters jumping for joy, but Our Man, a rather scoundrel young man of a century back, is a downbeat, sallow little fellow, who nonetheless possesses the delicate nose and compelling eyes of a young lover. The other sister wants him as well, and they find themselves in a swirl of mutual desire; the Three of Swords, three swords piercing one heart; a love triangle straight from the Tarot of their lives.

Before the viewer knows what has occurred, the Sister Who Loved Him First is carrying the results of an unwanted preganancy in her arms, mourning on a park bench for the desperate situation she finds herself facing. And he, like the blackguard we always knew he was, seems to have vanished into the fog of memory, the dream-like interplay between inner visions as experienced by the little girl who climbed a barren tree, and the one who, with her sister, walked down a country road with stark fiields sweeping from left to right; the road lined by tall, straight trees.

(We witness their backs as they, together, proceed into the distance; walking the roadway in an indelible image of the Dreaming Brain. All images from life exteriorized from the subconscious real of All Possibility; the primordial soup of illusion that is reflected, like one of Cocteau's mirror Portals, on the flickering screen.)

The woman finds her sister who has departed, no doubt enraged at the fact that she has been cast over for her sibling, as a presumed prostitute, a striking contrast in a self-assured sense, her fine exterior elegant and upscale as compared to her frumpy, frowsy sibling.

She finally takes shelter or lodging with a mustachioed old peasant man who offers her a square of bread. Our Blackguard is killed by the sister, who must be enacting the revenge of blood, fulfilling the curse of violence and the storm that consumed her parents so long ago. We close with the image of a lamp, black, against a grey and troubled sky.

Ménilmontant is a moving, yearning poem, an exploration of childhood dashed across the rocks of hope and despair, of unrequited loves, shattered dreams, and the blood curse that seems to reach through generations, creating a recursive, crimson loop of tragedy that is made the waking dream of those who view its face.

It is thirty-seven minutes of transcendent brilliance. It is cinematic perfection.

And that is sufficient.

Menilmontant - Full Movie 1926

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