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| Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is addicted to love in Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016) |
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It's certainly a testament to Anna Biller's incredible talent in constructing
The Love Witch's rich set design and wonky period detail that until Trish (Laura Waddell) whips out a cell phone toward the end of the film, I had no real clue as to what time period in which the film is set. The opening reveals the lovely Elaine (Samantha Robinson) driving in a shiny red vintage car (with matching dress and luggage), and her voiceover only tells of her zeal to start a new life after a tale of heartbreak and emotional breakdown. Flashes from the past show that Elaine's participation in a coven ritual has empowered her to start afresh, on a quest to experience love at its fullest.
The Love Witch is the story of that journey, and in a more significant way, the consequences that women must suffer in succumbing to the fairy tale myths about gender roles and love that are fed to them by society.
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| Elaine dines at the Victorian tea room with style |
Period anachronisms are what give
The Love Witch so much of its charm, as the film pays homage to great 70s occult films such as
Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971),
Baba Yaga (1973), Hammer films such as
Countess Dracula (1971) or even some Jess Franco oddity starring Soledad Miranda--although I think
The Love Witch does not tap into its queer potential. Biller's film is rather exclusively focused on hetero fantasies and nightmares (I couldn't help wishing that Trish and Elaine would end up together). Trish takes Elaine to an incredible Victorian tea room bathed in peaches and pinks, with a golden-tressed lass strumming a harp. A seedy burlesque club hints at
Blacula by way of
Blue Velvet.
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| Elaine and Trish hang out at Elaine's witch pad |
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| Elaine making some witch items for a local new age shop |
Elaine's apartment, borrowed from her fellow witch Barbara, is filled with kitschy tarot card paintings, a cauldron, and what looks like a well-equipped laboratory spewing smoke in day-glo colors. Here Elaine makes her love potions that she tries out on several unsuspecting men--to ill effect. In fact, a moviegoer sitting behind me kept saying every time a man interacted with Elaine--"Uh-oh, he's dead. He's so dead." Poor Elaine, she isn't trying to kill anyone. She just wants LOVE! Another nice thing about this film--no women were physically harmed in this flick. A rare thing, even for a horror comedy.
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| Elaine's bewitching gaze |
Much of
The Love Witch is so delightfully hyperbolic, that laughter frequently echoed through the theater. Elaine's sensual stare, enhanced by her witch powers, is so provocative, that it stops men dead in their tracks, zapping them like deer in headlights. There's something pleasantly off-kilter about a film emphasizing the power of a female gaze. While the film highlights Elaine's laser interest in being the object of a presumably male gaze, she tends to frequently be oblivious to her effect on others, which speaks to some confusions that the film employs. Is the film playing to a "male gaze" or critiquing it?
Still, many scenes just add to the overall zany tone. One of the true standout scenes is a horseback riding date that Elaine has with Sergeant Griff Meadows, a chiseled Bruce Campbell type (without the great chin). As they are riding through a wooded area, they hear music, and literally stumble upon a performance and feast put on by the Renaissance and Medieval Players. They sing "Love is a Magical Thing" and it's all rainbows and unicorns (literally). The costumes, accompanied by the music, are just too, too good!
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| Griff (Gian Keys) gazes into Elaine's mesmerizing eyes at their faux handfasting feast |
The couple are game for a quick costume change and then a handfasting, which Elaine revels in while Griff seems to amusingly tolerate. Biller is making fun of every fairytale cliche she can find, while also jabbing playfully at the faux witchiness of Renaissance and Medieval fairs. The soundtrack of this film is truly, truly inspired, and Biller has her hand in every great detail. When the harpist sings "So tra-la-la and so La-de-da" with such heartfelt sincerity, I was hard pressed not to sing along.
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| Elaine is every (straight) man's fantasy, but is clueless about her own desires |
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, all this lightness is tempered by a rather dark heart. At the film's beginning, Trish rightly calls out Elaine for some of her truly backwards beliefs, exclaiming "It's like you've been brainwashed by the patriarchy!" Both Elaine and her coven friends espouse the idea that women gain their power through their sexual wiles, but this power is limited only to a certain kind of glamorous, and largely unfulfilling seduction. Elaine's head is so filled with notions of fairy-tale romance and an obsessive, overpowering love, that she gains little satisfaction from the elaborate steps she takes to secure the desires of the men around her. In fact, she is so "brainwashed" that an entire scene shows her getting off to a chorus of emotional and verbal abuse spewing from the mouths of countless men, her father seemingly included.
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| Star (Elle Evans) and Moon (Fair Micaela Griffin) dancing very poorly at the burlesque club |
The Love Witch had a few confusing missteps that muddy its message a bit. The film does no favors for witches, suggesting (albeit hyperbolically) that these goddess worshipers are just perpetuating a rigid gender binary, and that they are only interested in fulfilling narrow narcissistic desires in a quest to bend the world to their will. Instead of empowering the impressionable Elaine, her coven pals only seem to lead her toward her inevitable doom. While the film seems to criticize the limited range of power that a woman's (hetero) sexuality elicits, scenes highlighting Elaine's wide variety of scrumptious lingerie are notable and numerous. Further, the film is almost entirely narrated through Elaine's voiceover (yes, she's pretty unreliable as narrators go), but toward the end of the film, the narration suddenly switches to Griff. Griff's thoughts emphasize that he's a complete cad, but I felt that this shift in narrative authority dis-empowers Elaine in some unfortunate ways.
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| Elaine rides off into the sunset with her fake prince and fake unicorn |
When Elaine realizes that Griff is not her fated true love, she shatters, forever slipping into the fairytale world where she ultimately gets her prince (and her unicorn). Alas, that world is both unreasonable and impossible for women fueled by such ridiculous fantasies, and the only recourse for Elaine is madness. Anna Biller's
The Love Witch is funny and entertaining, but ultimately supplies a sobering message to hopeless hetero romantics bent on getting their man.
