Arcana

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).

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.

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!

A portrait of a slightly weird guy living with his mother, who is a fake clairvoyant. He is discovering his supernatural talents.

Unsettling is the right word for this film. People, waiting to collect their welfare, are being kidnapped without a reason. A metro stops in a tunnel, people start banging on the windows from the outside. Unsettling is also the relationship between the protagonist and his mother. She is hardly angry when he ties her to the bed or makes love with one of her costumers in front of her.

The second part is even less comprehensible than the first part already is. He collects stuff and people seem to get more and more crazy. It is lovely bizarre, still not the David Lynch or Luis Buñuel kind of bizarre, but sometimes not far from it. There's a fascinating piece of cinema with a monotonous gypsy player and the mother suddenly coughing up frogs. Or the one with people waiting silently outside the door, one man glances over his shoulder.

I found it hard to understand why things were happening like this. Usually films have too much explanation, this film is an example of the opposite. There's not much sense of logic. I guess one of the reasons was the unbalanced editing. Some more interesting, surreal scenes don't have enough time to work, and less interesting scenes could have been removed. Especially the final could have been better.

Nevertheless, this is a slow, but surprisingly entertaining film, subtle and yet politically incorrect. This might not come as a surprise as the director, Giulio Questi, is also the man behind a thriller on a chicken farm (Death laid an egg, 1968) and a cult western with gay cowboys (Django kill..., 1967). These were the only three films he made. He was the uncompromising kind of director and that's why his films are still unique. This film is supported with great performances and music. Lucia Bosé is very good as the over-protective mother, and Maurizio degli Esposti is just as fine as the weird son with the feminine hairdo (he only played in four films). Also Tina Aumont, famous for Fellini's Casanova, but in fact specialized in playing parts in the weirdest section of 70's cinema. I rate it 7/10 for mystery.

Mrs.Tarantino is the widowed wife of a poor worker from southern Italy living with her creepy son in a shabby block of industrial Milan.She plans to make money exploiting as a charlatan a crowd of rich dullards looking for supernatural advice like tarot and hand reading.The mother is an expert in magic rituals and cleverly uses it to lure her prey,while her son is a psychic.The problem arises when the son falls in love with her mother's client and uses his arcane powers to gain her love with devastating consequences...Extremely obscure and forgotten Italian horror movie with some nice surreal touches and often implied Oedipux complex.The score by Berto Pisano is fantastic with phenomenal violin motif.I hope that "Arcana" will be released on DVD soon.8 out of 10.