Lost in New York (1989)

Jean Rollin’s Lost in New York (Perdues dans New York) can be seen as a precursor to his excellent movie Two Orphan Vampires (1997).

With his health failing Rollin turned to novel-writing in the 90s, with some success. In 1993 he published Little Orphan Vampires, a kind of surreal fantasy/horror fairy tale about two blind vampire girls. He went on to write a series of further novels about the blind vampire girls. Rollin was a huge fan of the French movie serials of the early 20th century and also of the 19th century and early 20th century pulp fiction serial stories known as feullitons.

You can see him already exploring very similar themes in Lost in New York.

An old woman, Michelle, is remembering her past. She is remembering a time when was a young girl and she met another little girl, even younger, a girl named Marie. Yes, this is a Rollin film so we’re going to get two girls who are in some mystical way doubles. Marie has a magic talisman, an image of the moon goddess. She also has a collection of adventure books. Marie tells Michelle they can enter the world of these books.

The girls can enter the worlds of adventure and fantasy fiction and movies.

Rollin throws in references to movies which are presumably personal favourites. They’re certainly the sorts of movies one can imagine that Rollin would love, movies like Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet. Also, interestingly enough, he references Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. It had never occurred to me before but Picnic at Hanging Rock really is a very Rollinesque movie – the obsession with time, a group of young girls, the subtle surrealism and the equally subtle eroticism, and the touches of horror and the hints of the supernatural or the paranormal or perhaps of other realities. And of course the notion of time as being less straightforward than most people suppose.

Rollin also gets self-referential, with lots of mentions of his earlier movies.

The talisman is sacred to the moon goddess.The girls decide that with the aid of the talisman the moon goddess can take them anywhere they want to go. It can also take them to other times. It could for example take them to New York. And it does. But is it the real New York? Whether it’s the real New York or a different New York the girls are there now but they cannot find each other.

We get introduced to the lady vampire who stalks the streets of New York.

Can the girls find each other? Is Michelle inside Marie’s dream or is Marie inside Michelle’s dream? Are they sharing the same dream? Is it a dream? Can we really say what is dream and what is not.

There is some doubt as to whether we’re dealing with an old woman dreaming of her childhood, or two children dreaming of old age. The past and the present may both exist at the same time.

And there’s Rollin’s famous beloved beach at Dieppe.

And there’s the nude black woman. The two little girls are magic girls. Maybe the black woman is magical as well.

Whether there is any real magic here or just imagination can be debated. And after all this is a movie and movies are not real, although maybe (like art and books) they’re more real than the real. And the two girls are just characters in a movie. Or maybe they’re characters in a story which takes place within a movie. This is to some extent a movie about movies and books, and about stories.

One might also suggest that this is a movie about the particular qualities of the female imagination. At the risk of sounding New Age-ish I might even suggest it’s about a particularly female kind of magic.

This is not a horror movie in any way, even with the inclusion of a vampire.

If you’ve seen Two Orphan Vampires or read Little Orphan Vampires (and if you haven’t you should read it) the parallels with this movie will be striking. Rollin has created a mythology, a world in which reality and popular fiction and fantasy are equally real. Or equally unreal. The world of the imagination cannot be dismissed as unreal. Books and movies create their own reality which we can enter.

Apparently Lost in New York came about when Rollin accepted an assignment to shoot some footage in New York for a French TV movie. Being a good low-budget film-maker he wasn’t going to pass up such an opportunity so he shot some footage for himself. He had no idea at that stage what he was going to use the footage for but some some later he came up with the idea for Lost in New York.

Rollin never stood still as a film-maker. He returned to certain themes and images obsessively but he kept developing and refining those ideas. In his late work (from the mid-80s onwards) he’s not just rehashing his earlier films. He’s taking themes he’s used before but doing subtle different things with them. Late Rollin doesn’t get as much attention as early Rollin but it’s just as interesting.

Redemption have included this movie as an extra in their Blu-Ray release of Dracula’s Fiancee (La fiancée de Dracula). The transfer is quite reasonable.

Lost in New York is an odd, haunting, poetic little movie. It’s very very Rollinesque and it’s highly recommended.