Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay/Morgane le Fay et Ses Nymphes(1971) -*½
I feel confident in predicting that you’ve never heard of Bruno Gantillon. There’s almost no reason why any English-speaker would have. A jobbing French television director whose work has been largely unseen outside his homeland, Gantillon’s greatest visibility in the Anglophone world comes from helming a few episodes each of “The Hitchhiker,” “Counterstrike,” and “Highlander: The Series.” Way back at the beginning of his career, though, he also made Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay. In much the same way that Pierre Chevalier’s Orloff and the Invisible Man shows what can go wrong when somebody other than Jesus Franco attempts to make a Jesus Franco movie, Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay demonstrates the pitfalls of trying to make a Jean Rollin film when you aren’t Jean Rollin. Less dreamlike than somnolent, and not so much erotic as merely languid, this movie proves that genuine eccentricity is impossible to copycat, and that operating at the arthouse-grindhouse intersection is a lot harder than it looks.
The protagonists certainly seem authentically Rollinesque at first glance. Lesbian lovers (or at least friends with lesbian benefits) Françoise (Mireille Saunin) and Anna (Michèle Perello, from The Toll Ladies and The Blood Rose) are on vacation together somewhere in the depths of the French countryside during one of their breaks from the university where they study philosophy and art respectively. The girls stop for lunch at an inn patronized by a fantastical assortment of rustic grotesques, where their youth and beauty seem to make them even more unpopular than they already would have been just for not being locals. The innkeeper, upon bringing them their food and wine, quietly advises them to spend as little time in the vicinity as possible, and impresses upon them the importance of leaving by a certain specific route. Naturally, then, that is not the way Françoise and Anna ultimately go, with the result that they somehow find themselves driving in circles for the rest of the afternoon and evening, even though they never take a single turn, or even encounter a significant bend in the road. Note that these loops don’t ever take them back to the village, either. It’s just the same stretch of woods, over and over again, as if they’ve detoured into Jellystone Park. Eventually, the car runs out of gas, and there’s nothing else for it but to trudge off into the night in search of help. The girls find the next best thing to help when they emerge from the woods onto a farm of some kind. Nobody’s up and about at this hour, of course, but there’s a nice, sturdy barn piled with dry hay to sleep on, which if nothing else makes for a marginally more comfortable place to spend the night than the interior of a tiny French sedan.
When Françoise awakens in the morning, however, there’s no sign of Anna anywhere. Right about when she starts to get really worried about her friend, Françoise’s search leads her into contact with a dwarfish, androgynous hunchback by the aptly unlovely name of Gurth (Albert Baillou, of How to Seduce a Virgin and The Enjoyer), who suggests that Anna has most likely gone to the castle. He can even show Françoise the way if she wants. We know something the girl doesn’t, though. Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay begins with a prologue scene set in a Medieval dungeon, in which a pretty young blonde is expelled from a coven of witches or some such thing. Gurth presided over the ceremony of banishment, so there’s a fair chance he’s up to no good now. The castle turns out to be built on an island in the center of a lake, reachable only by means of a small boat which Françoise finds awaiting her on the shore. And the moment she steps aboard, that boat begins crossing the lake unerringly of its own accord, despite having neither motor nor sail nor oars.
The mistress of this curious abode is Morgana Le Fay (Dominique Delpierre, from Julia and The Sextrovert)— the Morgana Le Fay, I presume. The castle, the lake, the farm where the girls spent the night before, and much of the encircling woodlands exist in her private little pocket universe, where time seems to hang suspended. The power of the underlying spell is bound up somehow or other with three talismans, each of which is under guard by one of Morgana’s ladies in waiting, Yael (Régine Motte), Sarah (Nathalie Chaine), and Sylviane (Usule Pauly, of Beyond Love and Evil and The Nude Vampire). The latter women are also Morgana’s lovers, and Gurth wishes he were one of those, too. The precise nature of the hunchback’s tie to Morgana is obscure, but it obviously goes back many human lifetimes, and engenders a great deal of envy, jealousy, and vengeful fantasy on Gurth’s part. But more to the present point, Morgana is a prodigious collector of hot chicks, which is where Anna and Françoise come in. The arch-witch intends to add them to her extensive harem, but to do that right will entail a great deal more than just kidnapping her visitors and calling it a day. All of Morgana’s girls are ensorcelled to maintain their youth and beauty for all time just as their mistress does, and a boon like that can’t simply be bestowed. It has to be purchased, at the price of the recipient’s soul. Also, souls can’t be taken, even by a magician as mighty as Morgana Le Fay. They can only be given away, knowingly and willingly. At the same time, though, the metaphysical cosmos evidently has roughly the same understanding of consent as a Silicon Valley Libertarian, so the rest of the film will concern Morgana and her minions applying escalating degrees of hard sell to Anna and Françoise, while Françoise (the philosopher of the pair, remember) tries to devise avenues of escape. Her greatest advantage in the latter undertaking, ironically enough, will be the strength of Morgana’s affection for her, which Yael, Sarah, Sylviane, and especially Gurth increasingly regard as a threat to their own positions.
If ever you doubted that Jean Rollin’s weirdest and most irreproducible talent was his ability to make engaging and sometimes even engrossing movies in which nothing happens very slowly, Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay will drive the point forcefully home. That’s because Bruno Gantillon doesn’t possess that talent to anything like the same extent. The film gets off to a promising start, to be sure, but it becomes apparent that something important is missing already by the time the girls bed down together in the barn. Nor does Gantillon seem to share Rollin’s earnest outlaw sensibilities, for the erotic content in this movie is annoyingly timid and tentative for 1971, and Françoise’s eventual surrender to Morgana feels unnatural and unearned. Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay belongs to that only-in-the-70’s tradition of movies in which evil doesn’t so much triumph as redefine itself out of existence: who needs an immortal soul when you can have life in an immortal body, and wouldn’t you rather spend eternity in bed with Dominique Delpierre than groveling before the throne of Yahweh anyhow? However, although Gantillon obviously recognized the commercial potential in exploiting the French public’s short-lived taste for such stories, it’s equally obvious that he did not himself feel their seductive pull. Not really getting why Françoise would succumb in the end to Morgana’s wiles, he catastrophically fails to sell the audience on the idea, either. Worst of all, that failure extends even to the climactic orgy sequence, in which Morgana pulls out all the stops to tempt Françoise with the full Sapphic sybaritism of her domain. It’s dull! Aphrodite above, it’s so fucking dull— a shortchanging of the libido comparable to Showgirls, but without that picture’s tawdry glitz to serve as an amusing counterpoint. This is not the party I want to be stuck at forever, and nobody needs to explain to me why Françoise would seek to use the hubbub of the bacchanal to cover her ultimate bid for freedom. By the same token, I very much do need an explanation for why she’d subsequently change her mind, and the one Gantillon offers is thoroughly unconvincing— even, or so it would seem, to himself.
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