THE LOVE WITCH is a beautiful and entrancing homage to pulp filmmaking of the 1960s, made all the more fascinating by its twist on gender politics and female power. Written and directed by Anna Biller (who also served as editor, production designer, costume designer and composer), the film is a colorful and slightly surreal exploration of romance, sex and the power the two share.
Elaine (Samantha Robinson) rolls into a quaint California town one afternoon in a bright red convertible, looking to start a new life (as the perky voiceover informs us). Following the untimely death of her husband, she is looking for a fresh start and new possibilities in love. Love, you see, is at the heart of this film. Love in its more antiquated definition and all of its trappings.
Embracing her new age-y witchcraft, she mixes potions, casts spells, relies on the power of her own sexuality to find a mate, yet every possibility falls short. Her beaus are inherently flawed and fail to live up to the ideal of maleness that has rooted itself in her head. In her heart of hearts, Elaine embraces a flawed ideal of love and femininity and her own emptiness will always doom her in the end. Biller’s film is an exploration of that definition (really more what it isn’t, than what it is), and the effects of what happens when that flawed notion works its way into our minds and take hold.
We watch Elaine float through her days and multiple ill-fated relationships with men she finds along the way. Elaine wants nothing more than the love and adoration of a man, though she has spent so much of her life confined by patriarchal oppression and definitions of love and relationships that even she is unable to discern what real love is. She is set on achieving this dreamy, medieval version of romantic love that she sees in her head, but has no idea how to find or maintain that fantasy in the real world.
THE LOVE WITCH is a beautiful film with a rich, eye-catching 1960s aesthetic, both in terms of setting and in terms of film craft. With the stunningly rich colors, soft focus, and perfectly set scenes, film would be very at home in another era, and could almost be mistaken as being such. Samantha Robinson turns in a masterful performance as Elaine. Her presence and delivery is rich and entrancing, yet just stilted enough to embrace the cinematic era being celebrated by the film. Her performance is also layered in the fact that Elaine herself is a somewhat stilted character, determined to execute and live out her fantasy of a white knight on horseback by any means necessary, even as it fails to fit into the world around her.
Somewhere between mystery, horror, comedy, romance and erotica, the film is a beautiful examination of love, feminism and gender dynamics. Though a touch on the long side, it offers so much eye candy in the form of the stunning costumes, sets and world that the wandering length is easy to forgive. Rich in color and composition, perfect in its imperfections and almost drunk on its own psychosexual vibe, THE LOVE WITCH is a visual and thoughtful treat. Biller makes fascinating work of examining cultural and historical representations of love, along with the power of female sexuality and presence.
