![]() ![]() Sharon Tate would have approved.Īnna Biller fully realizes her vision, which is such a rarity in filmmaking, where compromise and collaboration rule the day. Robinson exudes the perfect robot on lithium quality of her character, making this a strangely triumphant performance. Don Draper would kill to go to the strip club in this film. It's a world where men are suave and women are luscious creatures. Speech patterns are stilted and nobody ever talks over each other. The actors play the material with the utmost of sincerity. It's a little too slow at times and could have benefited with 10-20 fewer minutes, but part of me wanted to just watch this movie forever. THE LOVE WITCH is long, slow, and filled with endless pauses. It's as if she subjugates herself to the patriarchy, but her instincts can't help but snuff it out.Ī little warning. It's not played diabolically, however, as Elaine TRULY wants the love of a good man. Elaine finds her power by looking and acting the way men expect of women, but turns the tables on them once she has them in her grips. Trish has more of a feminist bent, but seems the unhappier of the two. She finds friendship with Trish (Laura Waddell), a married woman who disagrees with Elaine, who espouses using "womanly wiles" to satisfy her men. She frequents a female-only cafe where the customers sip on tea and listen to the stylings of a harpist. Take the camp out of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or DESPERATE LIVING and you'll find yourself getting closer to what THE LOVE WITCH has to offer.Įlaine fills her world with erotic paintings and tiered cake trays filled with an endless array of desserts. The costumes, makeup, music, hair, high key lighting and sets evoke a candy-colored dream land. David Mullen, use rear projection, reportedly as an homage to the shots of Tippi Hedren in THE BIRDS. When Elaine drives, Biller and her master cinematographer, M. She moves into a Victorian boarding house in Eureka, California, and if weren't for the presence of cell phones and computers, you'd swear it was set in the 60s. So what is THE LOVE WITCH? It's the story of Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a witch who seeks true love, but her potions keep leading to disastrous consequences. I don't want to hold a mirror up to life as it is". Ross Hunter, who produced the types of artificial melodramas Biller most likely emulates as well, once famously said, "The way life looks in my pictures is how I want life to be. Nothing in her films resembles real life, and it's strictly intentional. There's a little bit of Hammer horror, Russ Meyer kitsch, and Radley Metzler erotica thrown into the mix, but with a more modern feminist twist. It's all in service of a very specific aesthetic hearkening back to the Technicolor thrillers and dramas of the 60s and 70s. It's taken 9 years since her prior feature, VIVA, to get THE LOVE WITCH made, and much of that time she has spent hand sewing the costumes. By that standard, Anna Biller would be an auteur's auteur, because she does almost everything - writes, directs, produces, edits, paints the art on the walls.I mean everything! Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and, not kidding, Sofia Coppola make films you can peg as theirs within the opening frames. WAY BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS - My Review of THE LOVE WITCH (4 1/2 Stars)Ĭertain filmmakers have earned that exalted status of "auteur" because of an unmistakable voice and drive to have things their way. ![]()
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