Reviewed by Ria Bhatia ||
Anna Biller’s 2016 new age feminist film, The Love Witch, has recently and somewhat randomly gone viral in edits and screencaps. At the center of these surprisingly artful snippets are the piece’s stylistic and personal makeup choices, which makes sense because weaponized femininity and vintage aestheticism crash into each other to keep the film politically relevant. Elaine, our “protagonist,” is introduced as a woman who is merely looking for love, but the styling and striking makeup choices clue viewers in to motivations that supersede any earnest conviction. As Elaine continues to devolve and give into her violent whims, the shots pull focus to her signature powder blue mod eye makeup, which blends vintage nostalgia with a formidable hypnotic power. Other instances of generously suggestive costuming, like the garishly red jewelry and large pendants as focal points on Elaine’s body, also serve to emphasize her femininity and its powerful (though initially ambiguous) consequence. Eventually, though, we learn that Elaine’s agenda in playing up both the innocence of retro aesthetics and the intensity of her sex appeal is to disarm, seduce, and eventually kill multiple men.
The film’s style in terms of scene-building are also important in achieving the languidness reminiscent of vintage aesthetics, because it’s all the more significant when Elaine’s choices violate the expected 60s formula of a female gaze that is allergic to violence. For instance, the audience witnesses Elaine commit a murder in real time, watching her watch a victim bleed out. The scene’s disturbing quality is compounded by her obvious satisfaction and even disinterest; yet, curiously, the viewer is looking on–although in horror–from a warm, boudoir-style room that remains cozy and inviting. Complete with muted red bedding, an ornate period headboard, and a vanity set that suggests old Hollywood glamor, Elaine’s bedroom (essentially an extension of her physical magnetism) is set up to make visitors reluctant to leave. In keeping with the agenda of reclaiming femininity–dynamically counter-intuitive because it is taken back by way of dated tastes–the cameras quickly cut to Elaine galloping away from the scene of the crime on a symbolically white horse. As unsettlingly whimsical Renaissance-era music plays in the background, Elaine takes a deep breath, seemingly free, empowered and having “saved” herself, not only from an unhappy ending but also from the distressed damsel
typecast.
Though she is absolutely a delusional serial killer who has convinced herself she’s a victim of her circumstances (and therefore only doing what she had to do), Elaine successfully manipulates the same femininity that is often otherwise wasted on less interesting on-screen goals. This creates the film’s complicated version of vintage aesthetics punctuated by murder, along with Elaine’s singularly self-possessed confidence, which doesn’t escape audience notice. It’s what takes her from being just temporarily fascinating to so compelling that she warrants further freeze-frame analysis. As a result, the pseudo-renaissance of the film itself through the social media accounts trying to do it justice is part of what demonstrates its significance. In a cultural moment where women are interested in pieces that do not only portray feminism as static or morally superior and instead allow heroines to be neurotic, beautiful, and abjectly immoral, the value of era aestheticism and visual storytelling hasn’t gotten lost and is instead attractively re-purposed and re-discovered here.
