Nooblethenood
I'm not going to completely slate this film. It had some convincing elements, and began to get a sense of drama after a while.However, that's pretty much all I can say that's positive about it. It's extraordinary to think about the films that Nicolas Roeg has had a hand in, and then to see the genuinely shoddy camera, editing and soundtrack work in this. From a production point of view, it's well short of what it should be. Shots are wobbly where they really aren't supposed to be, the camera operator seems to be initially obsessed with unnecessary slow zoom shots when setting the scene early on. And it does that atrocious thing of the camera positively taking you by the hand, pointing at the thing that's supposed to be relevant, and shouting 'Look! Look at this! Look! It's really important and relevant to something that's going to happen in the plot!' Appalling! There is literally no visual, and indeed editorial, subtlety to this at all.Of course, the camera spends plenty of time picking out things to look at that are apparently relevant to the plot (such as the titular puffball mushroom), but the relevance of which is anybody's guess, and is never elucidated on throughout the film. It is a story evidently revolving around a mish-mashed kind of magical mysticism, and yet the mechanics of this are never explained. A family consisting of the mad old witch (literally) grandma and her two harridan daughters are, apparently, desperate to produce a male child. Apart from the suggestion that this comes down to the grandma's loss of her son, there is again no explanation of what exactly this will achieve, beyond them having a boy in the family. Why is it so important? Why does this require magical, potion swilling machinations and almost homicidal hatred towards the perfectly nice, pleasant new couple in the old cottage down the road? We have no idea, and nothing in the hackneyed performances of pretty much everyone involved provides any enlightenment.As the heroine of the story, Kelly Reilly manages to squeeze out (pardon the pun) one or two moments of dramatic complexity, but little more. The other female roles are variously overplayed or underscripted, and none are believable. As for the incidental male roles (more on that shortly), there's no-one who stands out... EXCEPT for Donald Sutherland.Now just check that for a moment. Donald Sutherland, someone who, in his time, has offered some of the really memorable, if ever somewhat eccentric, roles in film. In Puffball, however, he appears, as though out of nowhere, with no introduction or explanation, then wanders about in woodland pretty much dancing gaily around magical stones and fairy rings, grinning all the time like a Cheshire... well, idiot. Then, when he does speak he's barely audible, delivering every line in a low, drunken murmur, and when he is audible, the pseudo-philosophical claptrap he issues forth makes about as much sense as a ham bicycle. I have precisely no idea why he was even there, and what his character was supposed to achieve for the film.But, finally, the issue with the men. Fay Weldon is a writer with a certain feminist character, and certainly her novels are not without their confusing, or at least complex gender issues. However, I have no idea who, or what in human psychology, this story is supposed to represent or serve. The men are, essentially, incidental tools either to be used by the women in the story, or to provide the most vapid, inconsequential 'guidance', that couldn't guide a train along a straight track. They are cyphers, nothing more, used by the women in the story primarily for sex and impregnation, and they are apparently useless to offer any resistance to this role. The women, on the other hand, are either manipulative and utterly bewilderingly obsessed morons, or in the case of Liffey, a shallow, daft victim, who only makes it through the whole business by barely relevant or believable luck. There is no actual arc or development to her awareness of the world at all. Stuff just happens. It seems to me that this story has nothing to say about gender roles or relations at all, as its representations of both men and women have no bearing on reality whatsoever. Nor does it provide dialogue interesting enough to pardon this.For a moment, somewhere, in the latter half of the film, there was almost a dramatic rhythm and character appearing in Puffball, but it didn't last very long. The timing is well off: it's over-long and narratively awkward. None of the story really makes sense, and one feels that there was an intentional decision not to explain what is happening. However, this went to the extent of not explaining it AT ALL, leaving the viewer with no engagement in the story, no understanding of what was supposed to be happening and why, and absolutely no idea why it was supposed to be worth the bother.So, all in all, really not worth making the effort to see.Oh, and some really pointless and off-putting 'internal' graphic sex/genitalia shots, using what I can only presume were latex creations from the xxx-online boutique's Pervy Plastic range. I mean, loads of them. Let's just say, I reckon there's a reason why not many filmmakers have felt the need to shoot sex from the inside. It's not pretty, and it's not clever.
tedg
I sometimes mention films in which architecture plays a role. This fascinates me. I believe that the next generation of cinema will be highly spatial, with context in surroundings becoming more important.Welles' "Othello" used space in ways that both implied dangerous conscious reflection and showed the constraints of the world that drive the tragedy. Greenaway's "Belly" used architecture in more visceral way, merging the urge of forms with the relations among components of a human.This film here goes even further. It is no wonder that it is Roeg's least accessible movie, sometimes considered a failure. I recommend it. Here come some spoilers; I think it best for you to not read this before you have seen it.The character in this case is a house in Ireland, a very specific place on the border between the two religions. This is a place where the pre-Christian notions from Viking magic are still recognized and there is a tradition that the Celtic nuns were witches in this vein.A young woman from London buys the dilapidated house. She is an architect who worked in the firm run by Donald Sutherland's character. Something traumatic happened to the two of them, most likely an affair and she has left to find herself. That involves rebuilding this cottage. We are told that she will keep the outside as it is, but completely re-arrange the insides. Very quickly, the magic of the place conflates this building and its insides with her body, the "insides" being her womb. The cottage had been owned by Rita Tushingham's character where she and husband lived with two daughters and a son. A fire in the building killed the boy. The family moved to the adjacent farm. At the time of the story, we have Rita as an old, somewhat demented witch, living with her son in law and one of her daughters (Miranda Richardson), who in turn has two daughters. The other sister is unmarried and works in the office of the town's obstetrician. The old witch is obsessed with having a son. Nearby is magical stone with a vaginal hole. By touching your beloved through this hole, you make a bargain with Odin. The area is scattered with globular fungi about a foot in diameter, giving the film its name. That is where the story starts, and this is all revealed economically.The cottage is conflated with the young woman. The mother (Rita) and her daughter (Miranda) share a womb and magic is wrought to impregnate the woman architect/house and somehow transmute the male embryo from her to them. Along the way, there is lots of sex, sometimes magical and dreamed which every time ends with internal shots of ejaculation, followed by continuing shots within the shared womb of of the developing souls. This womb in turn is conflated with the puffballs around the place, locally called the devil's eyeball.The plot is defeated by Rita's granddaughter who is newly fertile herself. This all is really complicated in terms of narrative. There are multiple magical forces, shifting identities, a rather amazing role of music and musical magic. Twins and twining galore.It is confusing and intended to be so because it is from the point of view of the woman- building. The film is not there for the story, though. It is there so that Roeg can explore this notion of creation as space, story as birth, actor as magical token. What a trip.I can recommend this to you if you have the ability to give form agency, to see this from the side of the magic. I will warn off any women who are pregnant or soon to be, as it surely will produce nightmares.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
MARIO GAUCI
Ever since director Roeg's career went into irreversible decline in the mid- 1980s, he has intermittently been attempting to recapture shades of his former glory and this is surely another effort in that vein – what with its mystical/architectural themes and emphasis on sex, down to an irrelevant cameo by Donald Sutherland (from his masterpiece DON'T LOOK NOW [1973]). However, the result is only mildly compelling and as muddled as ever; at least, leading lady Kelly Reilly is most appealing – and physically reminiscent of Candy Clark, who had featured in the director's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). Like Julie Christie in DON'T LOOK NOW itself, he has recruited an icon of the Swinging Sixties, Rita Tushingham, to play the misguided 'witch' after the heroine (who is renovating the cottage in which the old lady's son had died in a fire years earlier). Aiding her in the 'cause' is Tushingham's middle-aged but still attractive daughter (Miranda Richardson, delivering the film's outstanding performance) and the latter's own reluctant offspring. Reilly is impregnated by her fiancé (who then summarily departs for New York) but miscarries soon after; realizing she is going to conceive once more some time later, the girl fears the father may be Richardson's younger husband (and so do Tushingham & Co.) – whom Reilly had seduced while drunk at her place! However, it turns out that she had originally conceived twins and one managed to survive the ordeal. Anyway, Tushingham's clan professes to befriend Reilly (while mixing disgusting potions ostensibly to assimilate her pregnancy onto Richardson, though the girl eventually exposes the others' scheme) – including giving a dinner at their house where the titular dish (dubbed "The Devil's Eyeball", actually this film's subtitle in the U.S.) is served; at the end of the day, in spite of Tushingham's death, the situation is happily resolved for the 'witches' as well when Richardson herself finally bears a son. For the record, among the remaining Roeg titles I have yet to catch up with, I own the following: INSIGNIFICANCE (1985), TRACK 29 (1988), SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1989; TV) and COLD HEAVEN (1992)
