With The Love Witch, writer-director Anna Biller evinces her understanding of every element in a 1950s or ’60s-era Technicolor production—whether it’s a Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minelli film, a Roger Corman adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, or a forgettable B picture—as either implicitly or explicitly pertaining to sex. The forceful fullness of Technicolor merges with the repressive cultural values of its era to forge an aesthetic that’s simultaneously forward and demure, yielding a head-spinning subtextual neurosis that most modern filmmaking can’t hope to recapture, with its uninhibited and taken-for-granted access to the profane. (Though, considering the conservative political winds of change that are blowing, artists may have to return to such coded evasion.) Technicolor is an inherently overheated palette, refuting the faux-realism that mars contemporary cinema, embracing unhinged emotionality as a gateway to visceral pleasure and perhaps profundity. Technicolor, like German expressionism, is cinema gushing right out of the tap, owning up to the medium’s origins as a method of fetishism.
If Biller had merely fetishized Technicolor, even this expertly, The Love Witch would be incomplete. The filmmaker bathes her frames in primary reds, blues, yellows, and browns, but she also infuses her film with totemic sensuality. The opening credit citing Biller as the set and costume designer is as important as her billing as the writer and director, as the subtly obvious sets abound in fleeting explosions of the sex that’s frustrated in the text. The sets are strewn with color-coordinated knickknacks, and with erotic paintings and statues, with beakers, test tubes, garters, and candles. The actors look eerily right for the late 1950s and early ’60s, the men with wavy hair, granite jaws, and accommodatingly blank and entitled expressions, the women with their ripe or repressed femininity (depending on whether they’re a temptress or plain Jane), and their flat, Stepford Wife inflection.
When the titular witch, Elaine (Samantha Robinson), strips for a man, emulating the burlesque shows that are eventually revealed to be a pivotal part of her story, the textures of her scarf and garter are as pointedly arousing as the colors and contours of her iconic body. Desserts are emphasized by Biller with a carnality that also rivals Elaine’s allure, as she rhymes sex and violence with immaculate pastries and sauces, as well as with the fashion, the objects, and the geometric oddness of certain rooms. A piece of chocolate cake is so mouth-wateringly delectable (and erotic) that it nearly throws one of out of the narrative. Sex and sugar have a similarity beyond their sensuality, after all, as they both exacerbate the hunger they’re supposed to sate—and this very hunger imbues The Love Witch with primordial force.
Biller’s fetishism flows from a sensitivity to how film tropes inadvertently reveal longing. There isn’t a portion of an aging Technicolor melodrama that Biller has left unmined, but she disrupts her spell in controlled alternating bursts, occasionally letting in contemporary explicitness as a means of highlighting the emotion that’s otherwise coded in the film’s aesthetic. The Love Witch isn’t technically set in the past, but in a present that’s rooted in a self-conscious movie-lover’s horny imagination. The opening sequence follows Elaine as she drives along West Coast cliffs, eluding a troubled past, looking for a fresh start in the tradition of cinematic black widows. She’s heartbreakingly gorgeous, a mysterious full-lipped brunette, and Biller drinks that beauty in, matching Elaine’s fabulous red dress with her red lipstick and red convertible, and, later, a red luggage trunk. Biller suspends us in a deep spell of objectification, only to break it briefly but decisively when Elaine arrives into town and casually passes an unmistakably contemporary BMW.
This sort of coitus interruptus frequently occurs in the dialogue as well, which merges ’50s-era presentational stiffness with 2000s-era talk of patriarchy and feminism. In one scene, Elaine breaks hilariously from her role as the embodiment of all heteronormative male fantasies to call her lover a “pussy” in voiceover, as he’s failing to provide her with the male cliché that corresponds with the obliging fuck toy that she’s presented herself as to him. Elaine believes in gender roles: She’ll be an obliging housewife by day and a tornado in the sack by night, but she expects her man to be the perfect Ken to her Barbie. In her way, Elaine isn’t as regressive as she initially appears to be, as she expects both man and woman to honor a contract rooted in myth.
The Love Witch has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision. At its root, it’s drunk on its own texture above any and all meaning that can be ascribed to it. Like Elle, the film isn’t resolved about the function of gender roles, as it owns the fact that repressiveness is a disreputable turn-on. Objectification, especially now, is so forbidden and verboten that it represents a pathway toward an animalistic state. Elaine is imprisoned by her hungers, which represent her self-loathing, but said hungers also occasionally set her free from her cage. This is an impossible paradox, not only of sex, but of life as American society has conceived it. We’re a series of preconditions that are perpetually at internal war. The Love Witch is an earnest and haunting dramatization of this war. Appropriately, it’s both a pastry and a dildo—dipped in acid.
Image/Sound
This disc captures the robustly filmic sense of texture, grit, and color that drives The Love Witch. Skin tones are detailed and subtly varied in accordance with the given mood of the film, revealing pores and wrinkles in harsh lighting, and reveling in voluptuous, painterly softness in the more Harlequin-esque passages. Colors have an explosive vitality, particularly the deep blues and blacks and various shades of pink and red. Yet, as beautiful as it is, there’s an essential roughness to The Love Witch that’s also preserved here, which is vital to its emotional piquancy. Certain whites are intentionally shrill, and certain background compositions are intentionally soft. The tactile materiality of this image is allowed to sing. The two soundtracks quietly bolster the film’s hypnotic atmosphere, preserving its aural delicacy, particularly in the instrumentation of the score, as well as in multi-planed rendering of the soothing, almost subliminal sounds of potions boiling, birds chirping, and horses galloping. An attentive and astute transfer.
Extras
These supplements are appropriately obsessed by texture. The audio commentary with director Anna Biller, cinematographer M. David Mullen, actor Samantha Robinson, and producer/actor Jared Sanford is led by Biller and Mullen, who avidly discuss the lenses, filters, lights, gels, stockings, and other tools that they co-opted to fashion The Love Witch’s distinctive retro aesthetic. Biller also goes into great detail about the clothes and other objects that she spent years fashioning by hand (such as the soaps and the Pentagram rug), off-handedly establishing the autobiographical elements of the film’s simultaneously neurotic and erotic sense of fetish. Biller has a habit of talking in earnestly casual poetry, elaborating resonantly on character relationships and themes, memorably saying, for instance, that she wanted to create a “suffocatingly feminine world” in an early tea-house setting, or describing the harsh white light of Rosemary’s Baby as “revealing the harsh scratches of the devil’s lovemaking.” Biller seems to think in purple prose, and the commentary serves as an inviting extension of her art.
The individual interviews with Biller and Mullen offer similarly instructive and resonant glimpses into their working methods, collectively establishing a quasi-political aesthetic philosophy that embraces pointedly figurative filmmaking as a refute against the clichéd, institutional tenants of “reality” that govern too much mainstream American cinema. The deleted and extended scenes are little more than odds and ends, riffs, really, but they make contextual sense as an opportunity to further revel in the small gestures and flourishes that Biller prizes. Theatrical trailers and a promotional video round out a terrific package.
Overall
This preordained cult classic has been outfitted with a magnificently rough and colorful transfer, as well as revealing and appropriately fetishistic supplements.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
