Baba Yaga / Баба Яга / Baby Yaga, Devil Witch / Black Magic / Kiss Me Kill Me / The Devil Witch (1973) DVDRip |
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Strange things have been happening to Valentina, a young and beautiful professional photographer, ever since she made the acquaintance of Baba Yaga, a mysterious older woman who gave her a lift home late one night. For one thing, Valentina has been having weird, kinky nightmares. For another, one of Valentina's cameras seems to have acquired a deadly curse. And then there was that visit to Baba Yaga's house, where Valentina discovered bizarre relics, including a dominatrix doll, and a bottomless pit in the living room. Valentina comes to realize that Baba Yaga is a witch who is out to possess her - body and soul...
Как-то раз, вечером, на улице Изабель случайно знакомится с таинственной женщиной, именующей себя Баба-Яга. На свою беду девушка принимает приглашение ведьмы. Баба-Яга дарит ей куклу, которая по ее словам, будет оберегать красавицу. Она также заколдовывает принадлежащий Изабель фотоаппарат, и со сфотографированными ею людьми отныне случаются всякие нехорошие вещи. На протяжении всего фильма сны Изабель наполнены мистицизмом и насилием. То она покорная жертва, то неожиданно сама становится палачом... |
Counter-culture photographer and all-round party girl Valentina Rosselli (Isabelle De Funès) gets more than she bargained for when, walking home through the streets of Milan in the wee hours, she narrowly avoids colliding with a speeding limousine. The driver, a mysterious woman who identifies herself as Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker), insists on driving the ruffled Valentina home, whereupon she swipes the poor girl’s garter clip and promises that they will meet again. The following day, Valentina’s photography session with a buxom model is interrupted by the arrival of the venerable hag, who comes on to her with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, puts a hex on her camera and insists that Valentina return the favour by paying a visit to her mansion. Thereon, things get progressively weirder as our intrepid heroine plunges head first into a nightmare cocktail of psychosis, sapphism and S&M.
Corrado Farina’s Baba Yaga is one of those films that could only have come out of Italy in the 1970s. It’s not quite trash and not quite art, nor is it particularly successful on the whole. It is, however, rather interesting, mainly because it’s so charmingly batty, its eclectic mix of horror, naive political posturing and soft-core eroticism somehow perfectly summing up the era in which it was made. The plot itself is a fairly loose adaptation of a series of adult fumetti (graphic novels) written and illustrated by Italian comic artist Guido Crepax. Entitled Valentina, they focused on the darkly erotic and often sadomasochistic dreams of the titular character, a young woman whose hallucination and fantasies blended with reality to the extent that what was real and what wasn't became indistinguishable. Baba Yaga herself originates from Russian fairytales: a cannibalistic witch who lives in a hut in the woods and controls the cycle of nature. Transported into modern day Milan, she becomes a decadent lesbian, living in a crumbling mansion with a great big hole in the middle of the hallway and breaking the speed limit as she cruises the streets of the city in the dead of night with her improbably fluffy cat in tow.
The vast majority of cinematic adaptations of comic books were at the time lacklustre, with Farina singling out Roger Vadim’s disappointingly prudish Barbarella as particularly lamentable. Baba Yaga’s greatest strength, therefore, is that Farina is clearly in love with and believes in the source material. He worked hard to convey its ephemeral and surreal nature, both in the blending of dreams with reality and in his use of the camera, which is intended to evoke the panels of a comic book. This is fairly subtle, and only really comes through in a particularly significant way in the sex scene between De Funès and male lead George Eastman, where the use of fragmented and largely static shots (including some still photographs) evokes Crepax’s panels quite successfully. (This, incidentally, follows a very odd scene in which the pair read one of Crepax’s Valentina books, breaking the fourth wall.)
Unfortunately, I can’t help feeling that the casting choices rather scupper the tone that Crepax was going for. As it turns out, Farina wanted Elsa Martinelli for the role of Valentina and Anne Heywood for Baba Yaga. The latter backed out at the last minute, going as far as to pay a fine for breaking her contract, and was replaced by Carroll Baker, who proved herself to have the professionalism Heywood lacked. Unfortunately, as Farina himself readily admits, she’s all wrong for the role physically, lacking the androgynous qualities of the character depicted by Crepax and most of the time coming across simply as a healthy middle-aged woman wearing a lot of pale make-up. As for Valentina, the scrawny, bug-eyed De Funès, chosen by the French co-financiers, is a far cry from the voluptuous figure of Crepax’s fumetti, but she’s actually quite good in the role, and her bowl cut helps make the illusion complete. By far the biggest problem is George Eastman, playing filmmaker Arno Treves, who in fact didn’t appear in Valentina but was parachuted in from another Crepax series. Best known for his spaghetti western and action thriller roles, he doesn’t fare well in this rather bland role which effectively has him playing the straight man to the psychotic madness unfolding around him. His inclusion is ultimately fairly pointless, and I can’t help thinking this otherwise surreal film would have worked better without his presence constantly bringing it crashing back down to earth.
And, of course, there’s always that nagging feeling that the film isn’t quite as avant-garde and enlightened as it thinks it is. At its heart is the overused “evil old lesbian as witch” motif, with the depraved Baba Yaga setting out to corrupt the purity of Valentina, who ends up having to be rescued by burly George Eastman. The film continually references the ongoing political and social turmoil that engulfed Italy in the early 1970s without ever really saying anything meaningful about it. This clash between contemporary politics and the age-old Baba Yaga myth is actually quite a good idea in theory, but it’s ultimately underdeveloped, and I suspect Farina may have tried to cram too much into the fairly concise running time. (Valentina was later adapted again in the late 80s, as a longer TV serial starring former gymnast Demetra Hampton, and can’t help thinking that this format is more suited to the concept.)
It’s difficult to make any claim for Baba Yaga as something particularly noteworthy or even particularly good, but it’s safe to say there’s nothing else quite like it in cinema. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a fan of this film, in spite of its flaws. So, trash or art? As is so often the case with Italian popular cinema from this period, the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Even if it’s no classic, it is at the very least a one-of-a-kind experience.
Информация о фильме:
Название: Баба Яга Оригинальное название: Baba Yaga / Black Magic / Kiss Me Kill Me / The Devil Witch Год выхода: 1973 Жанр: мистицизм, эротика, колдовство Режиссер / Director: Коррадо Фарина / Corrado Farina Сценарий / Writers: Guido Crepax (comics), Corrado Farina (writer) Оператор / Cinematography by: Aiace Parolin Original Music by: Piero Umiliani В ролях / Cast: Carroll Baker, George Eastman, Isabelle De Funès, Ely Galleani, Daniela Balzaretti, Mario M. Giorgetti, Sergio Masieri, Angela Covello, Cesarina Amendola, Mario Paolo Giordani, Carla Mancini, Giorgio Pellizone, Lorenzo Piani, Natalie E. Spleptzow, Rodolfo Zola, Franco Battiato, Michele Mirabella...
Выпущено / Country: Италия / Italy, Франция / France Производство / Company: 14 Luglio Cinematografica Продолжительность / Runtime: Rus DVDRip - 01:23:02, Eng/Ital DVDRip - 01:25:47 Язык / Language: Russian / English / Italian Русский перевод / Russian translation: любительский одноголосый Rus DVDRip
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| 20 января 2010, Views: 3219 |
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