Corrado Farina’s two best-known directorial works, They
Have Changed their Face and Baba Yaga, both feature supernatural
themes in a modern-day setting (vampires and witches respectively): a quirkier
similarity is that they both contain pseudo-intellectual citations of Jean-Luc
Godard and feature odd parodies of product commercials (for LSD and detergent
respectively). The former is the more narratively robust work, its slow
build-up of Nosferatu mythology taking a sudden swerve into sharp corporate
satire, but Baba Yaga is, if nothing else, the more stimulating visual
experience. The film’s most direct reference is Antonioni’s Blow-Up: another
photographer (in this case a woman, Valentina, played by Isabelle de Funes) who
hosts a succession of models in her home studio: the studio is an eye-candy marvel,
from the zebra skin on the wall above the bed to the transparent telephone to
the library-worthy stock of art books. Walking alone one night, Valentina
encounters a strange older woman (Carroll Baker, with very few lines, which is
probably just as well) who rapidly takes a close, sensuously-tinged interest in
her, including giving the gift of a creepily-staring doll which may have the
power to come to life and cause mayhem; it’s all somewhat hampered by brevity
though, Valentina and her boyfriend extricating themselves in 80 minutes more
easily than seemed likely, and without any very meaningful explanation or aftertaste.
Still, it’s an arresting exercise in competing female willpowers, contrasting de
Funes’ open, searching appearance against Baker’s Gothic witchiness, Valentina
early on asserting her sexual self-determination, and thereafter fighting to retain
the power of the look against a reality perpetually disrupted by fantastic visions
(paralleled by how the film itself is regularly disrupted by series of still photographs
or comic book frames, or in one instance by a sudden digression into gangster
action, which turns out to be the aforementioned commercial shoot).