The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie
Tam Lin
Strait-Jacket
The Escapees Also fresh out of the loony bin are the two teenage girls at the center of Jean Rollin’s 1981 The Escapees (Netflix; quality: decent, with the occasional image flaw and missing subtitle). This is one of the fantastique filmmaker’s more reality-based works, and one of his most obscure (I can’t say if that’s for good reason or not, as I’m admittedly not all that familiar with his oeuvre—yet). At first its lead characters seemed iffy candidates to serve as full-on crazies in this column’s lineup; sure, they’ve both been institutionalized, but they are so young and clearly neglected and/or mistreated (very little is revealed about their pasts) that we can’t help but wish for their salvation. Strangers at first, these two polar opposites—wild, angry, self-sufficient Michelle (Laurence Dubas) and skittish, fragile, needy Marie (Christiane Coppé)—flee the hospital together and in no time develop an unbreakable bond. There’s no real plot or impetus driving the action, and Rollin himself calls the film “a bit of a disaster,” yet there’s something so arrestingly dreamlike about watching the girls’ adventures, as they fall in with mostly suspicious sorts, that it’s hard to look away. But The Escapees is essentially a tragic tale. Nothing really goes the girls’ way, and much violence ensues, fully earning Michelle and Marie their bad-girl badges.
The Countess
