One of the stronger entries from the 60’s spate of
European anthology films, The Witches is a five-part showcase for Silvana
Mangano (which might admittedly seem, across this time and distance, to be a
peculiar undertaking). Two of the segments barely register – Mauro Bolognini’s
is a one-joke thing (albeit a well-handled one), and Franco Rossi’s barely even
that. Luchino Visconti’s opener, a frostily languid look at a celebrity’s
spiritual malaise hits mostly familiar beautiful-people-in-crisis notes. Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s is the most formally and thematically intriguing – a zany, sometimes
Chaplinesque comedy in which a bereaved man and his son search (mostly through
urban wasteland) for a new wife/mother, striking out with the likes of whores
and shop dummies before settling on a lovely deaf girl (Mangano at her
loveliest), who utterly suffices until she dies from slipping on a banana peel while
standing on one of the upper levels of the Colisseum (yep), which isn’t a
problem because she returns from the beyond and things go on as before,
yielding the motto that being dead and being alive are the same thing (some
other Pasolini films might not lead one to interpret this premise as positively).
It’s at once the most frivolous chapter and yet the most socially-anchored and spiritually
questioning. The film ends with a Vittorio De Sica piece in which the star
plays a bored, frumpy-looking wife, her marriage drained of passion, trying to
buck up her low-energy husband while living a much more exciting inner life, all
of which is considerably lifted by the fact of the husband being played by a
(dubbed) Clint Eastwood in one of his all-time loosest, most game performances: it’s one segment that you might wish had been longer. With the added bonus of
its strenuously nutty opening credits, it’s a diverting if inherently odd package,
generally boosting one’s appreciation of Mangano’s range.
No comments:
Post a Comment