“Never forget that you are a woman, and the greatest powers you can employ as a witch are totally dependent upon your own self-realization that in being a woman you are different from a man and that very difference must be exploited.”

– Anton LaVey, The Satanic Witch

THE LOVE WITCH is a movie about a beautiful, vampy woman named Elaine (played by Samantha Robinson, who could probably be Lana Del Rey’s older sister) who has moved to a new town for a fresh start, and to seek out a man to love her using the powers of her newfound witchcraft. But it soon becomes clear that Elaine is deeply damaged, and her ideology about what it means to love is founded upon unsettling ideas about the fragility of men, and the responsibility of a woman to commit to satisfying his desires.

A review about THE LOVE WITCH wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that it’s shot in gorgeous 35mm, in homage to 1960s Technicolor thrillers and American exploitation films. Every shot is sumptuous, and carefully color coordinated – from the deep reds of Elaine’s car, lipstick, and luggage, to the pastel softness of a lady’s only tea room, to the magic rituals that could be pulled straight from a tarot card illustration. None of these sets could exist in the real world. They’re too careful, too clean. It pushes THE LOVE WITCH into a realm that’s not quite reality, almost a few inches to the left, as if we’re viewing the movie through a sort of subconscious filter. The effect is that the landscape becomes an emotional one, reflecting back Elaine’s sensuous and disillusioned inner world.

In the beginning of the film Elaine tells her new friend Trish, as they dine on tea and pastel cakes in the tea room, how she has come to understand the psychology of men.

“Men are like children, they’re very easy to please, as long as we give them what they want… [They just want] a pretty woman to love, and to take care of them, and to make them feel like a man. And to give them total freedom in whatever they want to do or be.”

Trish is horrified. She asks Elaine “But what about what we want?”, and goes on to say that women can never be equals if they’re always catering to men’s needs. Elaine however, is unperturbed, and we soon follow her as she rides with a man she just met to his woodland cabin, feeds him a hallucinogenic tincture, and seduces him.

Elaine has made herself into what she believes men want. She’s reduced and shrunk herself into a tool for manipulation. Magic is about manipulation, after all, about subverting nature to get what you desire. Every aspect of her personality is about making herself pleasing so that she can receive love. That’s why she appears as a one-dimensional character, a caricature – she says herself that she is a man’s “ultimate fantasy” – and a fantasy is an ideal where reality falls in between the gaps.

‘Art cinema exploits its spectator’s boredom, becoming as much a cinema of expectancies as one of attractions. It turns boredom into a kind of special work, one in which empty onscreen time is repurposed, renovated,  rehabilitated. …we might say that as the art film increases its demand on the spectator’s labour, it reduces the expectations for its performer’s labour. The boringness of art films exposes that genre’s insistent disarticulation of the body onscreen from the body offscreen: a belaboured spectator mirrors in reverse the nonbelaboured body of the character onscreen. A complex set of dependencies proceed from this formula: screen time’s open or indeterminate quality triggers a different mode of spectatorial labour that appears enabled by the very determinate quality of the “unbelaboured labour” of nonprofessional actors.’

Running through The Louvre, from Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.