6/20/2023 0 Comments Love witch![]() Our protagonist suffers violent flashbacks, discloses a history of clinical treatment (‘They say I’m cured now’), and is determined to create a new life for herself among strangers. Out of her purse tumbles not Marion Crane’s wad of ill-gotten cash, but a handful of Tarot cards, emblems of Elaine’s desire to foresee and control her destiny in love – and an omen of her ultimate inability to do so.Īll the signs of a horror film homage to the master of suspense are set in place within these first few minutes. When Elaine reaches into her handbag for a cigarette in these opening shots, Biller also plants the first of innumerable visual metaphors. ![]() Our witch, we learn very quickly, is haunted by voices and visions, particularly of her werewolf-haired but clean-shaven and unsettlingly smiling ex-husband, Jerry, who appears in the film only in flashback and voiceover. In one of the film’s many nods to Hitchcock, The Love Witch opens with Elaine alone in a car, fleeing her past. As the title of the film promises, the beautiful, bewitching Elaine will have love, but not, Biller artfully ensures, with the results that she desires. Like Barbi, the beleaguered protagonist that Biller herself played in her 2007 debut feature, Viva, Elaine in The Love Witch struggles with both the men and women in her life to pursue and finally have her will.īut unlike the more outwardly innocent Barbi, Elaine has a crystal clear vision of what her will looks like – and much more powerful means to realize it. Six centuries and more later, director Anna Biller has given us The Love Witch, which eagerly and expertly uses the resources of film to complicate the Wife of Bath’s answer. The form of the Wife’s narrative thus informs its elegantly precise but endlessly resonant meaning: a woman wants her will, and she will have it, whether the men around her will or no. Responding to the often unflattering portraits of women that her fellow (and mostly male) pilgrims had painted, the Wife boldly spends more time telling her own story (of marrying husband after husband to pay her the marriage debt) than she does in telling her actual tale. ![]() The film pulsates with furious creative energy, sparking excitement and amazement by way of its decorative twists, intellectual provocations, and astounding humor.Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer gave his adamantly serial bride, the Wife of Bath, almost 1,300 lines of his “Canterbury Tales” to consider this inexhaustible question. Biller’s feminist philosophy meshes with the freewheeling delight of her aestheticism. But the movie is less a matter of story than of style-it’s filled with ornate period costumes and furnishings (which were handmade by Biller) as well as sumptuous swaths of color and old-school optical effects. The action parodies classic movie tropes-the drifter who returns to a small town, the flowing-haired professorial Adonis, the police officer whose investigation is compromised by divided loyalties, the burlesque bar where everyone meets and destinies play out. Anna Biller ingeniously tweaks some Hollywood conventions and clichés of the nineteen-sixties in this wild and bloody comedy about a young Wiccan named Elaine (Samantha Robinson), who uses her supernatural powers to attract the men of her choice, and, when they disappoint her, to kill them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |