Malpertuis
directed by Harry Kumel
starring Mathieu Carrière, Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire
Radiance Films
Fans of director Harry Kumel’s classic vampire film, Daughters of Darkness, know his penchant for creating surreal dream-like atmosphere in his films. With his 1971 film, Malpertuis, Kumel jettisons all narrative logic and creates a film that feels like a fever dream that you are attempting to explain to another person. The effect is a jarring yet beautiful film that reveals more of its secrets with each viewing.
Jan (Mathieu Carrière), a sailor on shore leave, ventures out into the port city seeking directions to his childhood home, only to get conflicting information from the locals who can’t seem to decide if the place still exists or ever existed, or in which direction Jan should go to find it. As night falls, he finds himself at The Venus Bar, a nightclub in the red light district. After Jan is knocked out in a bar fight, he awakens in his room in the mansion called Malpertuis. It appears that the entire family has been called home to pay tribute to the ailing patriarch of the family, Cassavius (Orson Welles). When the old man dies, his will is read, and it divides the family fortune equally among his survivors, with the stipulation that they cannot leave Malpertuis. The situation quickly unravels with increasingly bizarre discoveries, leading Jan and the audience to question his sanity and the very nature of reality. Eventually Jan’s late father reappears to help him escape, for Jan to discover even more madness.
The intentionally disorienting film heightens its dreamlike quality through its use of deliberate artificiality. In the opening sequence where Jan is wandering through the city, every time he turns a corner or enters a new street, it is actually shot in a different city. Kumel also designed the interiors of the mansion to not connect in a logical way, a trick used later by Stanley Kubrick in creating the off-kilter reality in The Shining (1980). The result is a film that can initially be difficult to watch until you settle in on its wavelength, only for Kumel to repeatedly knock you off balance with the multitude of twists in the film’s final act.
Based on the labyrinthine novel by Belgian author Jean Ray, Malpertuis has been released in various edits and under a variety of titles over the years, including the U.S. release titled Legend of Doom House. It has seen nearly a half house hacked out at different times. This new 4K restoration of the film sees the full version as originally created by Harry Kümel, who oversaw the restoration. In addition to the film, the Radiance Films blu-ray has a plethora of extras, including a fascinating audio commentary by Harry Kümel and assistant director Françoise Levie, where the director explains his visual trickery used on the film and tells tales of working with the notoriously difficult Orson Welles (spoiler alert: he doesn’t disappoint in being charming and maddening), and he comes as close as any human in explaining what is happening in the film.
