Arcana

Experimental occult film that makes very little sense narratively... but may make some kind of sense symbolically - though I'm not sure.

You must be a fan of arthouse, dreamlike, highly symbolic films to really get through this one. Even then, it's pretty slow in part. I liked the soundtrack - appropriately unsettling. I wish the ending added up to something. I guess it's a cautionary tale. Don't practice black magic.

ARCANA is what you get when you mix Fellini's realism and Buñuel's style of surrealism with Argento's visual flair. It's a bizzare and fantastical tale of a clairvoyant mother and son duo with lots of sexual imageries and whimsical scenarios. This film is great at promising and terrible at delivering those promises. At several points, it feels that now it's going to get interesting, but soon that threads gets dropped for something entirely preposterous and completely unrelated to the plot. The sloth's pace also doesn't help and it trudges from scene to scene without any holistic meaning. It doesn't follow narrative conventions, but at the same time, it fails miserably at telling a compelling story which has shades of everything but is ultimately about nothing. It's just a series of disjointed scenes stitched together like an increasingly grotesque nightmare. It's a challenging film to watch not only because of its unconventional narrative and plot but also because of its god awful dreariness. You won't remember much but when you try to recall it, it'll feel like as if it was something distinguished(which it isn't, even remotely).

For his third and last full length film, Guilio Questi mixes art-house with exploitation and leaves me feeling like one of those crazy chickens from Death Laid An Egg. Initially this seems to be a horror film about a mother and son who do tarot readings and pretend to heal folks, whilst both of them have genuine powers that the son feels should be exploited more. The actual story itself then proceeds to be buried under a barrage of surreal imagery until the film ends.

That's not to say I didn't like it though. The horror elements are presented first, with the son healing their customers as they sit in a circle babbling (one of them pishes themselves into the bargain). The son also has hundreds of pictures of hands and random people arranged in specific patterns over which the son dangles animal teeth before dressing up like his mother with a pair of tights over his head. You know, the usual stuff teenagers get into.

The son seems to take a liking to a certain girl who comes for reading regarding herself and her boyfriend. She asks the mother for a love potion but the son isn't too happy decide to make his own, but doesn't quite know how. Around this time the tarot cards start playing themselves and dishes start moving around the kitchen, which gets worse when the son ties up his mother, starts cutting her breasts with a dagger, and gets the real love recipe from her.

Although up to this point we've already witnessed people with missing limbs being arrested from a queue in a bank, characters turning around to deliberately stare into the camera, and small kids dragging an egg on a string about for no reason, nothing quite prepared me for the "Family dancing to fiddle music while the mother vomits up live frogs while subway workers try and get on a subway train but also while another fiddler plays music to a bemused donkey being hoisted up a building scene". Have I ever mentioned that Questi used to work with Fellini?

Things get even more fragmented after that but what's the point in mentioning every crazy thing that happens? This is more of a weird trip than a film, and it's a pity Questi stopped making films after this, because I'd love to have seen his art-house take on other Italian Exploitation films like the Mad Max rip-off and the Jaws rip-off!

I was following Arcana for the first half. It told the story of a psychic and her son. The psychic appears to be a fake, running a con game on her clients (although she does mention that her mother was a true witch). The son is odd, sometimes dressing in women's clothes and stealing photographs from his mother's clients. The relationship between mother and son is charged with sexual tension. The story begins to change when the son becomes fixated on a pretty girl, engaged to be married, who comes to the mother for a reading. It was there the film lost me.

In the second half, the son begins to take a dominant role. Is he crazy, psychic, running a con, or some strange combination of all of these? There are flashbacks to the countryside where the mother's mother works her magic with a house full of gypsies and a donkey outside suspended in air. The film builds to an ending so grim that it could be described as apocalyptic, if it is to be taken literally. The film opens with a scrawl stating that the film is a card game and not all of it is real. I was left confused by both the ending and the film as a whole.

Arcana has much to recommend it. Lucia Bose as the mother is excellent and she gives the performance her all. In the country scene, she looks to be actually removing toads from her mouth. If that is not a special effect, then Miss Bose is one fearless actress! Furthermore, the film is eye catching with the hypnotic country scene being the stand out (catchy gypsy music too). An often intriguing film, but the ambiguity proved too much for me.

This weird , out-of-the-schemes movie is one of the few Giulio Questi's works. Rough and poorly made, but with some sense of measure (thus very real-life-looking) it occasionally slips into the usual clichés of trash 'b' gore - horror works but the overall result is surprisingly suggestive.

It happens sometimes that obscure directors happen to make something really outstanding , only to fall back again in mediocrity for the rest of their careers (remember Tobe Hooper ?) .

This spooky and politically incorrect tale of filth and horror is almost dead and gone: the movie is impossible to find , there must be still one copy in some wet vault (the grave of old movies) and folklore says that the director himself was looking for a copy of it.