As Louis Malle's most eccentric project by any stretch, Black Moon collapses because Malle, who intended to craft a surrealist epic from his own dreams, enters the arena of Dali and Buñuel sloppily and awkwardly. The filmmaker pushes himself toward Chien Andalou territory, but in lieu of improvising during the screenplay stage, Malle improvised from behind the camera -- a mode grossly unsuited to the bulkiness and cumbersomeness of on-set work. (In the wonderful book of interviews Malle on Malle, he admits that he began with the barest outlines of a script, and wasn't even sure how to approach the production on many mornings.) Louis Malle was, at his utmost, a behavioral realist, gifts that two of his features from the early '70s -- 1971's Murmur of the Heart and 1974's Lacombe Lucien -- put on full display. But whereas, in those films, the relaxed dramatic architecture yields richer behavioral observation of the characters, the similarly "liberated" narrative architecture of Black Moon renders the material (with its fantasy-laced context) completely impotent and fruitless.
Black Moon's visual style also betrays just how dramatically the material cuts against the grain of the director's realist tendencies. The film never captures a Derenesque off-kilter visual quality; the oddest aspect of it is that it remains, visually, firmly grounded in spatiotemporal realism -- thus, a schizoid relationship exists between the film's style and the subject matter. Malle seems to be striving for some deeper meaning with the material, but even if one identifies and defines the cross-cultural (and cross-theological) mélange of archetypes, the picture (ostensibly about a young girl's passage into adolescence) never says anything profound or all that interesting about its subject -- and becomes thoroughly steeped in pretentiousness. Most critics agreed, though Black Moon had a scant few defenders, among them the brilliant Susan Sontag and an array of child psychologists who found the buried narrative and psychodramatic subtext intriguing. Oddly, although Black Moon might feel unparalleled, it is not entirely unprecedented in the ranks of mid-'70s Eurocinema; it belongs to a weird subgenre of European features from that era -- such as Polanski's Diary of Forbidden Dreams, Blier's Calmos, Borowczyk's La Bête, and Rivette's Duelle -- that all plunge into turbid, sexually charged fantasy realms.