Baba Yaga (1973)


Baba Yaga is about a witch, but not about one living in a forest in a mobile house walking on chicken feet.  The movie is based on an erotic comic book series called Valentina by Guido Crepax and Corrado Farina, being a fan, decided to bring it to life.  Unfortunately, what happened is the producers and the studio decided to hack his film to bits and re-edit it, cutting out some of the erotic parts and omitting entire scenes all together.

This is the version of the movie I saw, under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me, although Farina has sinced gained control of the film and released the version he made.  Even as a victim to studio tampering it remains and interesting, if flawed, supernatural movie that somehow holds together despite the dreamlike quality of the narrative.

Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) is a photographer living in Milan.  One night on her way home she sees a dog in the road and, when a car comes barreling out of nowhere, she rescues the dog.  The car happens to be driven by a woman who calls herself Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker).  She takes a clamp off of one of Valentina's garters and states that she will visit her, which she does after a photo session the next day.  At that time she seems to do something strange with Valentina's camera.  Soon whatever she photographs breaks, and people are wounded or die. 

Enthralled with the woman Valentina visits her house and, after taking some pictures, is gifted a strange bondage-clad doll named Annette for protection.  The doll, however, has a life of its own, transforming into a living woman (Ely Galleani) at Baba Yaga's whim.  In an effort to resist the witch's pull Valentina confides her sometime-boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) who tries to help her once he can no longer deny something strange is going on. 

Although Carroll Baker is first-billed Isabelle de Funès is the focal point.  Even through the dubbing her performance stands out, alternating between frightened and aroused, sometimes within the same scene.  When not dealing with her witch problem she has an easy-going relationship with almost everyone else and is quite believable playing a photographer.  George Eastman gets a significant role as Arno and he and de Funès have good chemistry.  The only lackluster one is Baker, who doesn't do much other than talk and threaten.

The mystery portions of the movie work as do most of the more surreal and supernatural parts.  The one thing that unfortunately doesn't work is that the film, though based on erotic material and containing quite a bit of nudity, fails to be erotic itself.  Corrado Farina is artful in his direction, using animation and still prints as well as strange locations, but whenever it is time for something sexy to happen his desire to make art pretty much gets in the way.  

Still, Baba Yaga is a surprisingly good film from one of the lesser-known directors, and at some time I need to check out the version he meant for everyone to see.  I don't expect it to be any more grounded than the original but it is always good to take time to appreciate what the artist intended.  

Baba Yaga (1973)
Time: 89 minutes
Starring: Isabelle de Funès, Carroll Baker, George Eastman, Ely Galleani
Director: Corrado Farina

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more