In a rare turn, Lips of Blood is a Rollin film centered around a male lead. Jean-Loup Philippe plays a character that has often been referred to as an extension of Rollin himself. Rollin and Philippe co-wrote the script which is the strongest Rollin ever worked with. The film begins with a sequence where coffins are carried into an underground tomb. Gasping sounds come from these coffins. Following the opening scene, a party is taking place. Jean-Loup Philippe's character is hypnotized by a picture on the wall of a landscape showing ruins. The imagery triggers a long lost childhood memory. A powerful flashback depicts Rollin's actual son who was seven years of age at the time. He walks up to the gate of a castle inside of the ruins. At the gate appears a beautiful woman, played by Annie Belle, dressed entirely in white. The boy gives the mystifying woman in white his toy and is given a place to sleep within the confines of the castle. Piano, strings and horns are heard and are beautifully melancholic. Simple yet remarkable cutting shifts back and forth in time. When it is present again, he is forever changed by this memory and the visions connected with this moment in time. He asks around about the picture, to find out that the photographer of the picture has recently left the party. At the party, is his mother who he attempts to explain to this remembrance of time and the importance behind it.
When the man arrives at the apartment of the photographer he quickly finds out that she has been paid to forget where she was and what she saw. By the end of this brief visit, the photographer tells him to meet her at an aquarium later in the night and she will let him know where she was. Soon after walking outside, there is a cinema with a massive poster of The Nude Vampire on the theater wall. He walks into the theater where a screening of The Shiver of the Vampires is taking place. In the theater, he begins experiencing what become a series of increasingly intense hallucinations. These visions consist of the woman in white. Shortly after leaving the cinema, he sees her again standing in a graveyard. Eventually, he winds up in the underground crypt seen at the start of the film. The coffins found are opened, large bats are seen in these coffins. The bats shape shift into vampires.
It becomes apparent that the female vampires he set free unknowingly are walking the streets protecting him. At one point, Jean Rollin himself appears, looking surprised and horrified at the sight of these vampires. They attack and kill him in a collective fury. Later, there is a desolate fountain area where a man is trying to harm him after following him from a subway disappearing act. The vampires turn the fountain and lights on, obscuring the sight of the dangerous and unknown man. Sequences like this one demonstrate what an extraordinary and unique director Rollin was. He was able to take a typical location and transform it into something else entirely, filling the world with immense beauty and strangeness.
Naturally, the ruins are discovered as the story develops. The tale of the female vampires and the woman in white is explained. As in countless Rollin films, the final scene takes place on the beach. The ending and the entire film have a profound sadness running through it all. Annie Belle gives a touching and gentle performance that fits the mood and tone perfectly. Jean-Loup Philippe's performance is understated and has a perpetually mournful feel. The way I see it, the memories represent romantic notions of things that are forever lost yet kept alive in the mind. In a sense, that can be applied to a tremendous section of Rollin's films and life as an artist. A final embrace takes place before the coffin heads into the sea.
This Blu-Ray release is gorgeous, containing outstanding color and texture. As every Kino-Lorber Rollin release I've viewed so far, it is the best transfer of the film that exists. The sound balance is spot on as well.
Lips of Blood is light in the department of supplemental features. There is a short Rollin introduction where he briefly notes that the shoot was tough due to only having three weeks to shoot when there was originally four to five weeks of shooting planned. He also states that Lips of Blood is the best script he ever filmed. There is also an emotive interview with Natalie Perrey who plays the mother, served as a producer and designed costumes for the vampires. She goes into all of the rather large challenges that Rollin faced while making the film. She explains that it was the first Rollin film where the bulk of the crew didn't believe in the work and worked against Rollin instead of going out of the way to serve his vision. Her personal memories of the film marred her appreciation of the work until recent time. Perrey also talks about working with Rollin's son. The interview is short but cuts straight into the important details and stories about the making which are unfathomable, considering how glorious the end result is. One of Rollin's finest works gets a superb release.
