Les sorcières

*** out of ****

This is basically a collection of five short films all about women and the roles that people feel that they play in society. It gives us different interpretations of women and how people feel around them.

The first story is about a famous actress who hides away from the public at a ski resort, before discovering that she's pregnant. But when she calls her husband, he is not at all supportive of her desire to have children. It starts out slow, but it becomes pretty haunting to watch after a while.

The second story gives us a woman who has an injured man in her car who is supposed to drive him to the hospital, but instead drives by several of them before going to where she wants to go. The man doesn't appear to be hurt too badly. Perhaps this is supposed to be a comment on how a woman supports a man in times of need?

The third story is an indescribably weird and chaotic satire of a father and son who look for a woman to be the father's wife and his son's mother. They come upon a woman who is deaf and are able to get something going with her before the story gets even weirder. This film actually really made me feel weird and left my mind broken in a million directions, but i couldn't stop watching it no matter how much i tired.

The forth is a story about a man who murders several people because of a woman. This one isn't really funny at all and is actually pretty depressing when you really get right down to it.

The fifth story has Clint Eastwood in it as the uninteresting husband of a woman who escapes into an imaginary world where she gets sweet revenge on him for being so boring.

My favorite story is the third, simply because it is so strange and unlike anything that it must be seen to be believed. Overall, i enjoyed it and found it to be very entertaining and interesting. It's creepy and weird if you aren't prepared. Check it out.

contains adult content and some violence.

As a decent but not great anthology movie, some parts of The Witches were not very good. A couple of segments I forgot while they were still going, with #2 and #4 feeling particularly lazy, and kind of unfinished. Segment #1 wasn't as bad, but it was a little boring.

The Pasolini-directed segment came third, and that one made me laugh a couple of times. It was absurd and silly, and some side characters in it felt like they predicated Super Mario Bros.

But it's the Clint Eastwood segment - the final one - that I came to The Witches for, and it made the whole thing worth watching. They get him to do some ridiculous things in this, and I don't know how. There's something that verges on a fantasy/musical section and he just looks so awkward and grumpy; smiling through the pain. I feel like someone had dirt on him and blackmail might've been involved, but it was neat seeing him play someone very different from his usual stuff (and I'm not just saying that because he was dubbed into Italian, but that is like a whole other level of crazy).

A film made up of five short films of varying length. Not your average portmanteau enterprise though because there is no link between the various works except that they all star the producer Dino De Laurentiiis' wife, Silvana Mangano and all feature a witch, except they don't, 'b****' more like. A promotional reel of some ten minutes would give the impression of something quite wonderful because within this saga of just under two hours there are some fine shots and marvellously evocative visuals so evocative of the times. A roll call of the directors involved is also impressive, Visconti, Bolognini, Pasolini, Rossi and De Sica but the individual pieces and the overall effect of chucking them all together, not to mention the desperate attempts to get us to laugh, tend to make this a rather painful experience overall. Very much a part of the 'Commedia all'italiana' genre, loved in Italy and France but of nil impact in the UK it features two of the most famous comedians of the time, Toto and the aforementioned Mauro Bolognini. Toto appears in the most irritating but also most memorable segment, that of Pasolini, which is a black comedy saturated in primary colours. The closing section from Vittorio De Sica probably attracts the most attention today as it features a fledgling Clint Eastwood playing it both straight as a hen pecked husband and also as a comic book hero. I fear I may have made all this sound far too interesting when I found it so difficult, worth at least one watch, though, I guess.

The best 25 minutes of Clint Eastwood's career lurk inside this uneven grab bag of shorts by five directors, among them greats. So good is he in Vittorio De Sica's brilliant segment (as the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit who unleashes his wife's libidinous Walter Middy) that you wonder what would have happened had Eastwood done more comedy. His gifts were wasted on spaghetti and spurs.

De Sica's imagination is the star here. The rest of the material is mildly charming, middling, dated, watchable only for Silvano Mangano, or, in the case of the Pasolini, dreadful.

Visconti's sketch is the best; he always did well in elegant surroundings and Mangano is at her best here. De Sica has Eastwood before he became a star and forgot how to act; it's a pretty good look at a marriage gone stale. The other three sketches are pretty much useless.