Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973)

 

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).