Les Revenants

“Les Revenants” is a stylish and beautifully staged French ghost story, shot for TV and, apparently, comprising eight or nine episodes, each about an hour long. The series looks like the Swedish vampire movie, “Let the Right One In” -- it’s locations exude an aura of wintry isolation and scenes shot at night are filmed with extraordinarily deep focus: we seem to be peering far into the corridors of the darkness, gazing down long autumnal passageways toward remote pools of light. The opening sequences is poetic and indelible: the camera tracks toward a case in which butterfly specimens are pinned to a white background. Suddenly, one of the butterfly corpses comes to life, flaps its wings, and, then, breaks through the glass, gliding with eerie balletic motion through the funereal landscape. A series of elliptically designed scenes shows us that a mountain village, high in the French Alps, has suffered a terrible tragedy -- a school bus full of High School students has plunged off a winding road into a gorge in front of an elegantly curvaceous and towering dam. A huge lake is impounded behind the dam and there are high peaks, draped in snow, looming over the still water. The scenes showing the dam and the lake are similar to images in Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter”, a Canadian film also involving a fatal bus accident, and, also, look like images in Bill Forsythe’s great “Housekeeping.” We see a group of grief-stricken parents, counseled by a bright-eyed doctor, working together on a post-modern and ugly monument to their dead children. And, then, suddenly, the dead come back to life, at least, some of them. A teenage girl, Camille, clambers out of the fatal ravine and hikes down the switchbacks to town. In a matter-of-fact way, she goes to her parents’ house, encounters her mother, who is half-paralyzed with astonishment and joy, and, then, after ravenously, eating something, takes a bath. Parallel cutting shows us other apparitions -- a small boy with lemur-eyes named Victor, an angry young man, and a man in a hooded sweat-suit who viciously murders a woman in a tunnel under a busy roadway, a location similar to an ominour pedestrian subway in the Swedish vampire film. The teenage girl who has returned from the dead knocks on the door to summon her much older sister. But, with a shock of recognition, we realize that the two girls are twins; the reason one looks much older than the other is because the surviving child -- she feigned illness to spend the morning with her boyfriend -- has aged normally, while the ghost girl remains as she was when the bus accident killed her. The first episode of the series establishes mysteries that, presumably, the program will solve, or elucidate as the series proceeds: who is the strange little boy? Why does an old man try to burn a ghost-woman to death before committing suicide from the parapet of the huge dam? Who is the assailant of the girl eviscerated in the pedestrian tunnel? The second episode of the show invokes “Twin Peaks” and seems to me somewhat more conventional -- in fact, I fear that a staple of Cable TV, the serial killer plot, may erode some of uncanny strangeness in this show. The imagery is surrealist and sometimes witty -- a big dog trots down a flight of stairs to sniff at the disemboweled girl; a diner is improbably located at the foot of a sheer basalt cliff and houses are perched in remote hanging valleys among the peaks. The set decoration is extraordinarily clear and precise: glacial Le Corbusier-style homes tastefully decorated with abstract art and collages of polaroids and the landscapes have a numb, icy beauty like paintings by Magritte. A little girl seems to summon black water up from a drain and it swirls around filling a sink with inky fluid. Meanwhile, above the dam, workers worry that the water levels in the reservoir are mysteriously declining. At the edge of the city, there are desolate tracts of project housing and everyone, it seems, is concealing some kind of sinister secret. Camille wonders if she is some sort of zombie and, in one funny, but poignant scene, a bereaved woman who has remarried since the accident, encouraged by her priest to believe her fiancee's resurrection is merely a fantasy, tells the baffled ghost that she has "permission" to think about him, "permission" even to desire and embrace him. The ghost is puzzled because he doesn't know that he's dead. A religiously inclined psychiatrist thinks the revenants are a miracle. But others believe that this fleshy resurrection -- "the resurrection of the body," to be sure -- is some kind of grim and grotesque mistake. The series is languidly paced, employing long takes, and there are many ominous puddles and reflective surfaces and grim mountain landscapes. The people in the series look like real folks -- their faces are not particularly glamorous or handsome and they have pockmarked complexions but, almost all, are distinguished by radiant, huge, and gleaming eyes. This seems to be an excellent TV series and can be seen on Thursday nights at 8:00 pm on the Sundance Channel.