Film Movement Movie Review: I Am Not a Witch (2017)

Available Now

Fascinated by the way that "accusations of witchcraft [are] almost always aimed at women," Welsh writer/director Rungano Nyoni returned to her birthplace of Zambia for her years-in-the-making feature filmmaking debut, I Am Not a Witch.

A fiery mix of fact and feminist fairy tale, the tragicomic Witch, which was made using nonprofessional actors and cinematic techniques reminiscent of Von Trier, Fellini, and the Italian neorealists, deftly satirizes the power and gender politics at play in a Zambia witch camp where an eight-year-old unidentified orphan girl (later dubbed Shula) is sent after villagers label her a witch.

In a Kubrickian opening sequence set to the first movement of Vivaldi's "Winter," gawking tourists snap photos of witches posed entirely for their benefit. Each witch connected to a lengthy spool of ribbon to tether them to the camp where they live (or fields where they work for the government and seemingly without pay), the image is a hard one to shake and at the end of its ninety-three minute running time, in a simple yet unforgettable final shot, Nyoni casts those spools in a whole new light.

Chosen as England's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category of the Academy Awards, Witch ushers in a vital new voice and visual storyteller whom I predict we’ll be watching for years to come.

Narratively inspired by the French fairy tale Chèvre de Mr Seguin (aka Mr. Seguin's Goat), Nyoni stresses throughout the production notes of this Film Movement theatrical release that her work is much closer to fiction than reality. 

Yet, the film's powerful, unstudied performances and largely improvised dialogue from a cast of performers who'd never been in front of a movie camera before make it difficult to separate from contemporary neorealism inspired fare including Ponette, Children of Heaven, City of God, or Osama.

And this becomes that much harder given both Nyoni's decision to root the work in enough authenticity that it won't fly away like a witch off her spool of ribbon as well as the knockout performance of young lead Maggie Mulubwa (who was photographed by Nyoni's husband during a location scout, later necessitating the crew to go back with the picture to try and track her down).

Centering your film on a child largely alone and suddenly thrust into a situation beyond her control wherein Shula and the camp’s state guardian from the Ministry of Tourism and Traditional Beliefs, Mr. Banda (Henry B.J. Phiri) is exploiting her "powers" for money in exchange for promises of rain in the middle of a drought, for example, immediately brings out the viewer’s inner protector.

Needless to say we want to shield the girl who is forced to declare herself a witch or else be turned into a goat. Helplessly we watch as Shula first enjoys the sense of camaraderie with the other witches as well as the pride of bringing back a basket of gifts for identifying a criminal (essentially through a random guess).

Things change quickly however when she discovers not only the hypocrisy of Banda but also the cruel way she and fellow witches are treated out in public and especially the threats leveled at them, which seem just as (if not more) dangerous than being turned into a goat.

With roughly ninety percent of the film told through the largely silent Shula’s eyes, there are times when we wish that Witch could’ve provided us with a better developed secondary character to expand Nyoni's fascinating landscape even more and Nyoni attempts that with a female character one would never have guessed had been a witch.

But as Shula's story first and foremost and moreover, as a poetic fairy tale about an Alice or Dorothy sent to a gritty, exploitative, satirical Wonderland or Oz wherein sadly there's no place for them to call home this approach works very well.

Driving home her point in the end with an understated, near dialogue-free, show don't tell sequence, Nyoni casts a captivating spell over viewers who – like the tourists getting off the bus in Witch's beginning – are sure to be eager to see more from a director at the top of her form.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Elizabeth Harvest (2018)

Now Available

We open on an eye – Elizabeth Harvest’s eye – newly awakened but taking in her surroundings as if still in a dream, as her romantic voice-over reveals.

A new bride being stolen away to her husband's "secret world," the image of the beautiful Elizabeth (Abbey Lee) in a car being driven by her husband (Ciarán Hinds) on the edge of a cliff on a lonely mountain road is idyllic only for an instant. But as her voice drops away, the shot expands, recalling the opening credits of Kubrick’s The Shining and an ending that's anything but happily ever after.

And the fact that, upon carrying his decades younger bride across the threshold, the wealthy older widowed scientist Henry (Hinds) gleefully points out out that they’re "participating in a kidnapping ritual," only adds to our sense of foreboding as does the fact that he's often framed above her in a powerful position as if he's a teacher ready to scold.

Pulling back from the happy couple to unveil the household staff, including the cryptic housekeeper Claire (played by the always compelling Carla Gugino) and the loyal, blind, obedient Oliver (Matthew Beard), Venezuelan writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez follows up his allusion to Kubrick with a structural nod to Hitchcock’s Rebecca in his sumptuous slow burn spin on the French fairy tale Bluebeard.

Frequently translated to film, it's a work that even Hitchcock himself couldn't resist adapting with Cary Grant in the lead in Suspicion, which studio head David O. Selznick sanitized in a happy ending which took place on a lonely mountainous road that could've doubled for the one at the start of this film.

Determined to tell you a story you know both in a way (and within a world) that you don't, Gutierrez blurs the edges of Gothic romance, science fiction, and suspense in this genre blended experimental effort.

Not interested in making Brides Dead Revisited (sorry, I couldn't resist), in a progressive change of pace, our unusual eponymous lead not only fuels the bulk of the increasingly complicated mystery but is also given more than a fighting chance to take on whatever crosses her path.

Leading her through his labyrinthine estate early on into the film in a sequence that echoes the fairy tale, Henry explains to Elizabeth that much like him, her thumbprint is the only passkey she'll need to enter any one of the luxurious rooms on the premises, before that is, he stresses that the only room she must promise never to go in is the one so bright it gives off a bridal diamond-like glow.

Dazzling her with the sheer amount of jewelry and fashion she now has at her disposal, while Elizabeth is understandably overwhelmed, we're not only curious as to the origins of their unlikely relationship but also distracted by the suspicious clues that production designer Diana Trujillo, art director Francisco Arbelaez, and set decorator Juliana Barreto Barreto have hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps foreshadowing Henry's nefarious intentions and the way he sees his bride in the predatory art that hangs on the wall alongside some of the primal objects littered throughout, since the film is set in and around one location, it's intriguing to note the ways in which our relationship to the darkly lit rooms evolve over the course of its running time.

Subconsciously linking the brightly lit room to sexual desire, Henry kisses her passionately within range of the warm glow. Told to be "a good girl" by a man old enough to be her father, we know what's coming even before he turns around as, much like Pandora and the box, when Henry leaves for the day, the mystery room is one place she’s bound to go to "be bad."

Turning the fairy tale on its head, while of course, the entry to the room places Elizabeth in peril, it also resets the narrative in an ingenious way at the same time by giving the audience (and additionally our viewer surrogate, Elizabeth) a startlingly vital clue to a puzzle that will take the rest of the film's running time to solve.

In doing so, it relies rather extensively on the introduction of a character’s diary as well as substantial expositional dialogue in order to help untangle the ambitious web woven throughout. But fittingly, just like the many twist filled books and films that must've influenced the work from Frankenstein to Brian De Palma's '70s and '80s tales of Hitchcockian obsession and beyond, Harvest practically demands a second viewing to help make sense of it all.

Hindered slightly by a noticeable lack in tension once a major obstacle is cleared from our heroine’s path, although the last two acts could've benefited from tighter editing as we process the film's extended flashbacks to catch up, to both the filmmaker's credit as well as the sensational cast, we remain fascinated throughout.

Giving his longtime love (and one of my favorite actors) Carla Gugino one of her best roles in years, in past productions we've often looked to the empathetic Gugino to help guide us in an uneasy situation or take the temperature of the room. Fighting against that, Harvest tests Gugino’s range (not to mention her potential as a poker player) by asking her to reveal little and instead stay relatively still.

Unable to read various responses from a side eye to a laugh the "right" way early on, Gugino's character and her relationship to Lee's blank slate-like lead makes the most sense in hindsight, similar to the way that Christopher Nolan's Memento uncovered different sides of the performance by Carrie-Anne Moss both in retrospect and as the film went on.

Enhancing the dreamlike feel established in Lee's voice-over early on, Gutierrez and his longtime cinematographer Cale Finot move away from the ethereal light of Harvest's beginning by placing a painterly emphasis on bright primary and secondary color contrasts and chiaroscuro to offset the darkness throughout.

Ideally suited to play alongside this year's other brilliant Gothic fairy tale release via Matt Pearce's Beast, from Elizabeth Harvest's use of homage to the way it puts its source material through a genre blender before bringing it into the twenty-first century, Gutierrez's exceptionally well-made opus is as creatively daring as it is wondrously told.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Enchanted

Director:
Kevin Lima

Forget the Roomba. When it comes to cleaning apartments, would-be fairy tale princess Giselle (Amy Adams) sings the Oscar nominated “Happy Working Song” and her mellifluously melodic voice attracts animal friends from all around who help her wash dishes, scrub floors and make everything zestfully clean in two minutes flat. Although I confess it’s strange, in the films from Walt Disney Studios, the presence of animals that speak, dance, sew and make up a lovely young woman’s entourage is nothing new but it’s a sight mostly found in their beloved feature-length animated works like Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Little Mermaid. It’s a different proposition altogether when we see live action vermin and mosquitoes flee from New York City’s Central Park only to appear in the posh apartment of divorce attorney Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey) yet that’s just one of many scenes of inventive hilarity in Disney’s best “princess” film in ages, director Kevin Lima’s Enchanted.

Beginning with a full ten minute animated sequence, the viewer is thrust into familiar territory as we meet the fair animated maiden Giselle (still voiced by Adams) who, on the day of her wedding to Prince Edward (James Marsden) is tricked by Edward’s evil mother, Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) into banishment as she plummets from the kingdom of Andalasia only to find herself climbing up from the sewer into modern day Time Square. Convinced that it’s only a matter of time before her prince will come, Giselle sets off looking for help and finds unlikely and mostly unwilling assistance in the form of handsome Robert Philip, who, about to venture into an unromantic engagement with the kind but bland Nancy Tremaine (Idina Menzel) is prodded into rescuing Giselle by his daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey).

Filled with lots of Dinsey in-jokes and references to the history of the animated division of the studio along with giving three actresses who voiced princesses in the past cameos in the film (Jodi Benson’s Ariel, Paige O’Hara’s Belle, and Judy Kuhn’s Pocahontas), the delightful and surprisingly engaging Enchanted managed to hook me soon after the live action sequence began, thanks to the creative script from Bill Kelly who wrote the similarly themed Blast from the Past. However, most of the film's charm comes from the unceasingly talented Adams who, with her variety of excellent performances in the past two years, has the makings of becoming one of our top leading ladies. The film’s soundtrack featuring lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and music by Alan Menken received two additional nominations for original song for the tracks “So Close” and “That’s How You Know” and Enchanted also earned recognition by the Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards as the Best Live Action Family Film of last year.