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.

Surreal, absurdist (kind of), very Italian, very 60s. You should definitely see this movie if you like a) 60's clothes, b) 60's movie sets, c) weird movies, d) Silvana Mangano, and e) obscure Clint Eastwood titles (yes, he's in it, too), among other things.

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.

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.

I once caught 15 minutes on Italian tv of Pasolini's contribution and was completely fascinated by it. Having now also seen his film "Uccellacci e uccellini," made the same year as "Le Streghe" and in much the same absurdist style, I understand even more fully the political commentary being made in both films. The social and political commentary in Pasolini's work is delivered obliquely and with great humor but is nonetheless vital to an understanding of both the style and content of his films. Even after having lived in Italy for some time, speaking the language fluently and learning as much as I could about the complicated political events of the fifties, sixties and seventies, I am aware that as a foreigner I am still at a disadvantage to fully "getting" the point that's being made in these two films. I would think it would be nearly impossible to find them anything other than strange and disconnected without some familiarity with the Italian political milieu of that period. However, that said, I think the beauty of the stylization - successfully realized and united on every level, design, costumes, cinematography and most particularly, acting - works irregardless and is entertaining in and of itself. It's especially interesting to see a comic performer as beloved and mainstream as Toto was at that time, so willingly and completely giving himself over to a director as completely experimental and also so controversial in an extremely volatile political climate as was Pasolini. My only negative comment about "Le streghe" is that I wish it weren't so impossible to get hold of as I would love to see this very beautiful film in its entirety.