The Love Witch (2016) Reviews

The melodrama of 50s and 60s cinema gets shoved through Anna Biller’s unhinged prism in the delightful The Love Witch. There’s a little bit of Jacques Demy’s candy-colored musicals here, the repressed sexuality of Vincente Minnelli there, and all of it is run through her distinctly feminist and hyperfeminine perspective. She finds a way to combine the sexual neurosis of the Technicolor era with a modern-day sensibility, essentially finding ways to merge the profanity of today with the restrictions of yesterday.

The Love Witch still finds Biller in dire need of an editor to keep her pacing from wandering around too much, but her focus is more narrowed here. We largely follow the exploits of our title character, Elaine (Samantha Robinson, finding the perfect balance between stiff object and active participant), as she searches for love, deals with her coven, and evades the law. There are still a few detours that could largely be removed or go on too long, plenty of scenes involving the coven spring to mind but not the wedding ceremony that directly references Donkey Skin. The world needs more movies that directly reference Demy.

Yet we largely keep our focus on Elaine as she tries to find a lover who will marry himself to her strict gender guidelines. She’ll happily play both loving wife and wanton harlot if her male counterpart to act accordingly to the strictly enforced but unwritten code of gender dynamics. In her own way, she’s as regressive and oppressive as the patriarchal society that witches so often stand in stark contrast towards and act as disruptive forces against. She’s a willing Stepford Wife or Barbie looking for someone to complete her, which is the best and quickest way to ensure that all relationships will prove toxic and doomed.

It is endlessly fascinating to watch a character destroy herself through a cage of her own making despite having all the tools and means of escape. I’m not sure if she’s happy in the cage or if she’s too blind to realize how imprisoned and slavishly devoted she is to remain there, but Elaine is a fully realized and complex character. If Elaine is buying into the tools and markings that hold women down, then she a creation of a society that made her. Consider her journey something of a feminist Trojan Horse as her eroticism is the first thing you notice before the pain behind her blank, smirking face is revealed.

Consider me a fan of Biller’s cinematic worlds and as someone who looks forward to whatever she does next. We need her explicitly feminine viewpoint, her unabashed use of color, and fascinating set of influences that create a “specialty act” of cinema. Her cinema is an artisanal one, and it recalls the otherworldly nature of not only Technicolor but German Expressionism and other cinematic conventions that terraformed the world into something more mythic, grand, and fairytale-like than the real one.