Paradoxically, the pathos of the children here is less transparent than that of the widow or the adulterous mother. Obviously, the absurdity is worth seeing and laughing at. I don’t know of any horror or gore film where someone dies from being hosed down. That’s shameful, isn’t it? So no. We couldn’t have guessed that “Lucien Lacombe” would grab the hose and smash the head of the man in the yellow swimming trunks—Hilde’s lover, her mother Mrs. Susmeit—to contaminate the pool. But Robert Susmeit had no shortage of excuses, or rather, he had plenty of schizophrenia, and he took refuge in the room of the imponderable Monique Dingeldy, the young daughter of the millionaire widow. The sense of humor is grotesque and charming because the detectives who arrive are looking for clues about the yellow pool robe, and when Robert’s mother tricks her husband into going to the apartment, we meet the guy who rents it by the hour or day to the student who was her lover. Mr. Kirr is questioned by the police, and meanwhile Moni Dingeldy treats the servants paid by her mother like dogs and orders dinner that she doesn’t eat with her guest, the unwitting murderer Roberto. If Robert looks schizoid like the image on the King Crimson album, Moni is not clearly disturbed until it is too late and she seems more precocious or dyslexic: “Have you made love to a woman, do you like this or that to eat, were you at the Leonard Cohen concert on Friday? She also teaches Robert that no matter how he treats his butler, in the end throwing their tip money on the floor and thanking them encourages them to remain loyal. Kirr smells something fishy and then realizes that he was just used as an alibi and charges him the carnal commission he is owed. Hilde and he sleep together, and in the background, the music from Moni’s favorite vinyl record plays as she enjoys her time with Robert elsewhere. Moni’s overacting, like something out of Jet Set magazine, sets the tone for the sociopathological level we are dealing with: a young girl under the age of consent whose delusional, pretentious, and puppet-like mirror image can be seen in detail—without us seeing it—in the banality of her mother.

The widow, Moni’s mother, never stops dancing and going crazy at the local disco. The disturbing part, the last 20 minutes of the film, is when, finally, beyond all cheap excuses, Moni takes the shy, neurotic, taciturn Lucien Lacombe lookalike to bed, but as they lie embracing, they hear the mother in the next room screaming with pleasure with the man she picked up dancing. The twisted plan of chance invented by the film reaches its climax when Moni and Robert identify their anger towards their respective mothers for fornicating with strangers, and the viewer realizes that there are no coincidences that last longer than the toothless laughter of bad luck as the predicament of a spontaneous crime. The loose threads come together and Bat 69 will function as a hose, straight into the promiscuous brain of the stranger. The thrilling chase after the two furtive teenagers to the empty pool and then to the roof of the skyscraper. Free fall and Moni’s favorite song. Good ending.