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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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5
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7 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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SNEAK
PREVIEW
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DVD Release Date: May
27, 2003 |
The
groundbreaking adult-themed comic strips of pioneer artist Guido
Crepax are brought to life in this mod, hallucinatory melange
of fashion, fetish and the supernatural. It doesn't have much
of a plot — and what plot there is isn't really explained —
but avant garde editing and a surfeit of style make it worth
a view for anyone with tastes off the beaten path.
French actress Isabelle De Funès plays Valentina, heroine
of Crepax's late '60s strip named for the character. A celebrated
fashion photographer living the jet-setter lifestyle in Milan,
she hangs out with models, directors, artists, and leftist intellectuals.
One night, while walking home to her studio flat after a party,
Valentina is almost run down by an antique Rolls. The driver
is a mysterious older woman (Carroll Baker) dressed in the black
garb of a Victorian widow. Valentina accepts the woman's offer
of a lift home; as the car pulls up to her apartment building
the stranger suddenly reaches up our heroine's skirt to snatch
a garter snap from her thigh. Enigmatically, the strange woman
informs her that she needs a personal possession of Valentina's
— for reasons unexplained. She promises to visit her the next
day and return it. Before driving off, she prompts Valentina
to remember her name: Baba Yaga.
Valentina is both repelled by and drawn to the mysterious Baba
Yaga. Immediately after their encounter she begins having bizarre
dreams of being marched semi-naked by Nazis to the edge of a
bottomless pit, then jumping in. The next morning, as she completes
a photo shoot with a topless model, Baba Yaga shows up at Valentina's
door to return the garter snap. During her brief visit to the
apartment Baba makes it abundantly clear that she's interested
in Valentina in a sexual way. Before departing she also fondles
Valentina's favorite camera in a particularly odd manner. Later
Valentina discovers that the camera seems to be cursed. People
she takes photos of with it either suddenly become ill or die,
and other photographic equipment nearby seems to fail when she
uses it. Accepting Baba
Yaga's invitation to visit the mystery woman's dark, rambling
manor house, the enterprising Valentina uses the place as a
backdrop for a series of photos. While there she makes a bizarre
discovery: a large hole in the floor, concealed by a rug, which
seems to have no bottom! Is it the black abyss of her Nazi-themed
dreams? Baba Yaga presents her with a gift, a creepy-looking
doll in S &
M gear named Annette. Valentina takes the doll home, after which
things really start to get weird...
"Weird" being the operative word
here. Though framed by a simple story, director Corrado Farina's
approach to the film is every bit as avant garde and surrealist
as its source material. Baba Yaga is obviously a witch, yet
her motivations are never really clear. Is it simple lesbian
lust? What's the deal with the Nazis (and, in their stead in
one dream sequence, soldiers of WWI-era Imperial Germany)? What
does the bottomless hole signify —
the doorway to the netherworld, the emptiness of becoming a
commercial sell-out, or both? To wit: During a street protest
in Milan, Valentina snaps a photo of a hippy demonstrator with
her cursed camera, upon which he immediately drops dead. Later
she has a dream in which she's escorted to a boxing ring by
female models in Nazi uniforms. Baba Yaga seems to be her ringside
manager. For an opponent Valentina faces the long-haired protester
she saw collapse in the street. With a single blow she knocks
him to the canvas, dead. Is Farina trying to say that fascism
(commercialism?) leads artists to destroy liberal, revolutionary
ideals? Your guess is as good as mine.
While the plot had me scratching my head
in bewilderment, compelling visuals kept me watching. The film
is superbly edited, giving it a rhythm that is the story,
in a sense. The soundtrack contains some sublime pieces of music,
particularly the psychedelic rock theme — used again during
the fashion shoots — and the 'dueling saxophones' jazz number
accompanying the sequence in which Valentina and new boyfriend
Arno (The New Barbarians' George
Eastman) make love. (Another terrifically edited moment and
perhaps the visual highlight of the film.) Gorgeous Eurobabes
sashaying about topless are always a plus in my book, too. Ironically
enough, the movie really only stutters and stammers when the
title character is on screen. As the witch Baba Yaga, Carroll
Baker is rather leaden and robotic. Her clipped, pause-filled
dialog only reinforces the animatronic nature of her performance.
(The character also gets a sappy piano theme, the worst passage
of music in the entire film.)
In my limited capacity as a wordsmith I'm in something of a
quandary as how to best sum up this film... It's certainly more
'art house' than 'Eurotrash' — and to be honest, appraising
tits 'n' gore for exploitation's sake is a damn sight easier.
So I'll conclude by saying that watching Baba
Yaga is akin to peering through a kaleidoscope. It looks
pretty, it's interesting... but does it ultimately serve any
real purpose?
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Again,
Blue Underground goes all out to present North American audiences
a comprehensive DVD edition of a super-obscure European cult film.
Aside from a bit of grain in some of the darker scenes the anamorphic
widescreen transfer looks exemplary. The Digital Mono audio track
perhaps doesn't do real justice to the music (particularly the
groovy instrumental main theme) but dialog and sound effects are
clear and strong without any hiss or distortion.
Extras include the trailer, a poster/still
gallery and a DVD-ROM supplement highlighting Guido Crepax's original
Valentina strip, allowing a comics-to-film comparison.
10 minutes of deleted footage are provided, a few seconds of which
permit brief glimpses of full frontal nudity by Baker and De Funès
later axed by the censors. There are also two featurettes: the
22-minute Farina and Valentina, with director Farina explaining
(in subtitled Italian) his philosophy behind the film's visual
style, and Freud In Color (12 minutes), a brief overview
of Crepax's revolutionary impact on modern comics.
5/19/03 |
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