6. Tideland (2005, Terry Gilliam)
Jeliza-Rose, since the death of her junkie parents, walks in a desolation land mixed with fireflies and danger. Having only her dolls as company, she walks among the wheats where she meets Dickens, a mentally retard neighbor and a witch fanatic of taxidermy. While her father’s corpse is full of flies and decomposing, Jeliza-Rose dives into her games and fantasies.
Gilliam intented to contradict the common place that consider children as fragile creatures, showing us a girl, designed to survive in her magical power of imagination, being able to forget the tragedy and shelter between mansions and Barbies heads.
7. Hausu (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)
Summer vacations arrive and with them, the sweet taste of friendship. Six teenagers are going in vacation to a strange mansion where every paranormal event is anticipated by a cat’s power of omniscience. Here we can just forget of the plot and stay with an extravagant experimental treatment. Images overlap others, painted landscapes, freeky sound effects, chromas, slow-motion, flashback of B&W images, animated breakaways, cardboard set and collages.
The edition is just like a child doing what he wants. Heads cut, eyes inside a mouth, flying cats, skeletons dancing, faces change in the mirrors, a piano eating people, a devouring lamp and a violation caused by mattresses. This rare-house floats in blood under the funny and sarcastic musical tone, taking us out of the common space of horror.
8. Le Pont Du Nord (1981, Jacques Rivette)
A punk-styled nomad (Baptiste) and a woman just released from jail (Marie) meet three times without planning. Once it is an accident, two is a coincidence and three is destiny. On a poetic excursion through open fields, ruins and roofs they wander around Paris, following a spiral map which becomes a game, taking them to perdition. “I want to believe that we aren’t trapped” Baptiste yells. But women had already become tiny chips from this city-maze board, with stairs that never end, with plots that never resolve.
Based on magical realism where fantasy is contained in reality, they just pretend that lions statues are spies and cardboard dragons must be fought to find the treasure. Just like the windmills that Quixote confused with giants, Baptiste’s detective game leads her to think of imaginary conspiracies. “They watch us all the time”. And suddenly she uses her knife to cut off the eys of a women in a poster. Because Baptiste seems to be taken from a mythical fable, she doesn’t understand this industrialized world full of devices, so it represents a danger to her. Beyond that, there is the eternal telephatic female friendship in Rivette’s film. Marie and Baptiste let us remember Celine and Julie, who will wander around in a future Paris.
9. Black Moon (1975, Louis Malle)
“A mythological fairytale that take place in the near future”. Almost like a science fiction, this movie opens in the middle of an apocaliptic war between men and women. Lily, a young lady, will run away from murderers to find herself in an isolated country house, where strange characters habit. An old woman bedridden who talks to a rat, a girl breastfeeding her mother and naked children playing with pigs.
Situations like daisies that cry in pain when trampled, snakes that come out of the drawers, trees that bleed when pruned and sheep that kill their shepherd show us a world, under the logic of dreams, where nature and animals are anthropomorphized. Lily is an apocalpytic Alice who experiments a sexual awakening. The blackmoon is an astrological hieroglyph that represent sexuality and indomitable female power.
10. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette)
Celine, a cabaret illusionist and Julie, a fanatic of occult, play chasing each other through Paris, to end up meeting and developing a telepathic relationship. Caught by the mystery of a mansion whose habitants seem to exist in another time, they eat some magical sweets to remember what happens there. It’s a constant dejavu, a circular story, a disorienting dream, where magical realism and doppelgangers mix together. Everything happens in spiral.
As a game of switching identities, Julie transforms into Celine and vice versa. In this modern version of Alice in Wonderland, Rivette shows us destiny, parallel times, magic and randomness through clues, mysteries, patterns and possibilities.