![]() 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. It’s a minor quibble against a very good movie, one of the few retro tributes that transcends its aesthetics.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. An out-of-place scene at a roving renaissance fair feels like natural trim, but even that scene conveys some sentiments important to the overall story. The movie is a bit too long, but I also can’t decide what could be cut. There’s a fine balance of artifice and authenticity here that Biller mostly nails. All of this takes place in a world that’s beautifully rendered and feels surreal and intentionally fabricated, with characters that are highly stylized. Everyone is initially presented as a caricaturized stand-in that is later upended through a dark or funny turn. It’s the complexity of its characters that allows the film to thrive. She wants longing without desperation, and deep love without obsession. She kills her husband because she loathed always giving him everything, but her sex magic dictates that she will get all that she wants by giving a man all that he needs. She believes she’s creating her own fate through her witchcraft, but yet believes her fate is sealed by cosmic forces. Samantha Robinson is the titular love witch, and she’s a fascinating potion of sensual drive, calculation, idealism, and delusion. ![]() But I think Biller slyly modernizes the story in its humor and its pointed discussion of second-wave feminism in a post-feminist era. ![]() I think the film has been unfairly written off by people who feel like it’s nothing but an exercise in fastidious homage, similar to movies that purposely but hollowly recreate a grindhouse feel. The mock technicolor palette, music, costuming, script, presentational acting style, and 35 mm film all come together in a faithful recreation of a specific aesthetic. Biller’s meticulousness on the film pays off, because it feels right at home in her target era. Her magic of course backfires and she finds men are literally dying to be with her. Anna Biller spent over half a decade in pre-production on her tribute to ‘60s and ‘70s European horror, about a woman who, after having presumably murdered her husband, is seeking a new mate that she hopes to obtain through witchery. The Love Witch writer, director, set designer, costumer, composer, etc. Starring: Samantha Robinson, Gian Keys, Laura Waddell ![]()
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