Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/22/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 22, 2024

The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2015)

Samantha Robinson and Gian Keys in The Love Witch

Laura Waddell and Samantha Robinson in The Love Witch

Cast: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Jared Sanford, Robert Seeley, Jennifer Ingrum, Randy Evans, Clive Ashborn, Lily Holliman, Jennifer Couch, Stephen Wozniak. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: M. David Mullen. Production design: Anna Biller. Film editing: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller.

Anna Biller's The Love Witch is regarded as a feminist spoof or hommage to horror movies of the 1960s, but it's so uncannily straight-faced and precise in its recapturing of their style and mood that it's hard to tell that you're watching a movie made in the 21st century. It mimics the sources' wooden acting and leaden dialogue -- characters often address one another by name: "What do you think, Steve?" "I don't know, Griff!" It needles their male-gaze attitude toward women and recaptures their often flamboyant Technicolor sets and costumes: There's a scene at a celebration of the summer solstice with luscious primary colors not often seen outside of a candy shop or an MGM musical. It throws in some casual frontal nudity to remind us that the style lingered into the more permissive 1970s. Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a beautiful, chain-smoking witch who comes to a California town in search of love and makes life first grand and then miserable for college professor Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), her friend Trish's (Laura Waddell) husband, Richard (Robert Seeley), and local police officer Griff (Gian Keys). Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the sets and costumes, and even composed some of the music that isn't borrowed from Ennio Morricone's scores for Italian horror movies of the 1970s. The Love Witch probably works best if you're steeped in the source material, but it's undeniably watchable.