Four Great Films at BAMcinemaFest, Week 2
The Love Witch
Directed by Anna Biller
If nothing else, The Love Witch is an astonishing visual marvel: Every frame of this shot-and-edited-on-35mm film bursts with eye-popping color, and the ornate production design offers plenty of deliciously baroque details to savor. But though Biller is paying tribute to the Technicolor erotic films of old, she’s engaging in far more than just loving genre pastiche. Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is a woman obsessed with falling in love, and the film’s retro aesthetic fully embodies her hyper-Romantic worldview (in fact, the film is set in the present day). She is also, however, a genuinely complex creation: a woman exuding feminist agency who nevertheless carries old-fashioned ideas about love and romance, feeling no shame at pandering to men’s basest desires, then finding herself horrified when they turn out to be clingy, sniveling disappointments. In a world in which most men view women as mere sex objects, however, how else is a woman like Elaine to operate? The surprise of The Love Witch is that it becomes as much an absorbing character study and a nuanced examination of gender roles in society as it is a luscious fetish object. Screens June 24, 9:30pm, with Biller and cast Q&A to follow. Oscilloscope Labs will release the film theatrically.