User Reviews

Lucia Bose is one of the all-time icons of European cinema, and a lost but essential showcase for her talents is Giulio Questi's experimental ARCANA, a film that lived up to its title. Having recently seen a full-length (102-minute) version, I recommend it heartily.

Unfortunately not only the film but Bose's rep has gotten mislaid in film history. Most young fans today could recite a list of starlet Edwige Fenech's credits, yet Bose, who appeared in many classics by Antonioni, Juan Antonio Bardem, Bolognini, Bunuel, Cavani, Cocteau, Duras and Fellini (just to start off the alphabet!) is not recognized in her lifetime.

She toplines ARCANA as a fake spiritualist, working with her weird, arrested-development son to make a living with séances and private readings. Midway through the film we see some levitating plates and other housewares to indicate that the son is actually in touch with the spirit world, but basically the film unfolds in the interesting genre of SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON, until director Questi literally goes crazy in the 2nd tempo.

The morbid atmosphere is intense, though this is not a traditional horror opus by any means. Questi rather is a surrealist in the vein of Arrabal, Alexandro Jodorowsky and other midnight-movie favorites, and even includes his oddest fetish, the eggs & chicken from his most famous (and still applauded) work DEATH LAYS AN EGG. An unsung auteur is editor Franco Arcalli, whose presence on a film I have found nearly guarantees both weirdness and quality, whether working with Antonioni, Bellocchio, Bertolucci or Cavani.

The off-color material included here is probably what led to its obscurity, even in a world drenched with full-out pornography. I guess the material is harder to tolerate in a "real" film than in actual porn, which current inversion in tastes has put on an "anything goes" type of pedestal. At any rate, Questi has our hero Maurizio Degli Esposito, who looks to be about 25, routinely wandering down the hallway carrying a big butcher knife, to sleep with mama Bose because "he's afraid".

-MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD-

Questi ends the first tempo of the film, at just under the hour mark, with a horrific payoff where Esposito ties up mom's arms and legs in bondage mode, rips open her bedclothes to expose a breast and brandishes the knife -quite a cliffhanger.

Eventually in the second tempo we see that Bose is okay, and the implied rape/incest is left hanging for the viewer to wonder about (definitely the best strategy). A frequent client, beautiful young Tina Aumont, has been spied on by Esposito during his misanthropic subway rides, and he sexually assaults her during one of her palm readings by Bose, with mom failing to come to the girl's aid. Final reels become increasingly abstract, with a whole group of people awaiting a séance going Living-Theater-style nuts (under Esposito's influence no doubt), while he corrupts the neighbor kids who hang out in their tenement's hallway. Bose conducts a ritualistic abortion (!) on client Aumont, and film climaxes with a seeming revolution outside in which townsfolk are pitted against the military, resulting in a nihilistic finish of Bose cut down by gunfire.

One can well imagine a dumbstruck film festival audience plodding out of the cinema back in 1972 after sitting through this assault on the senses, lured in the first place by the participation of then essential European stars Bose and Aumont. Esposito, who is handsome but perhaps typecast as terminally strange, didn't have much of a career, though I see he subsequently starred opposite the divine Laura Antonelli in another weird, lost film SIMONA, a picture never released in America despite Antonelli's huge success several years later that opened up the vaults of her past work. (NOTE: SIMONA has recently been imported belatedly on DVD by Mya.)

Bose is a true Earth Mother here, the type of role that normally would have been assigned at the time to Sophia Loren but because of the sordid material would not have even been worth submitting to that regal legend. She is unafraid to look "ugly" (impossible) in closeups, but has a chance here to let it all hang out in one of her greatest roles. Aumont is beautiful as ever, lending her usual sexploitation quotient to the proceedings.

Questi's symbolism and motifs remain alarmingly obscure; especially in this case Esposito's cross dressing, making faces in his mirror and his morbid fixation on family-style photos and photos of hands. There is perhaps a social/political dimension driven home by repeated scenes of pickax toting workers underground on the subway, but a recurring image of a donkey being hoisted by pulleys up to the third floor had me scratching my head.

The musical score is one of the film's strongest assets, including a weird violinist on screen who serves almost a pied piper function and is essential to creating the surrealistic mood.

So far most user reviews of Arcana express bewilderment as to the meaning of its narrative, but it's not very complicated:

Spoilers:

This is a story of clashes between cultures, more than anything else.

Mrs. Tarantino has escaped the poverty of Southern Italy (Sicily) together with her husband and their only son, and moved to the rich industrial city of Milan, situated in the rich Northern parts of Italy.

Mrs. Tarantino - whose surname we know, her husband's surname being printed on a name tag on the apartment door - has escaped the poverty of Southern Italy (Sicily) together with her husband and their only son, and moved to the rich industrial city of Milan, situated in the rich Northern parts of Italy.

They carry with them to the Milanese, their foreign culture which to a large part is not well understood by Italian Northerners. The Tarantinos' culture is more inspired by Turkish and gypsy culture (as heard in the quite aggressive gypsy violin theme, which is a major ingredient of the music track, also carried in the images of a a wandering Sicilian violinist, playing as he walks on a road to - who knows?) . We are shown "incomprehensible" images and topics brought from the South, of strange dances, snakes, a woman regurgitating frogs and a donkey in a hoist being elevated outside a house; events that would be familiar to us if we knew more about Sicilian culture.

The Sicilian rural culture is shown to carry elements of incest, superstition, and trickery as a way of life in a heavily competitive environment. The views on theft, rape, body and bodily fluids differ from the more polished suit bearers of the North.

To support his family the husband did maintenance work on the subway, where he replaced rail tracks and laid new ones as the subway network expands. The subway workplace is a metaphor for the Sicilians' social status, they are literally run into the ground to do the "dirty work" for corporate Milan.

One day Mr. Tarantino lost his legs as a train ran him over. His workmates carried him outside into the sunlight, but he soon died as a result of the accident.

Now left to a meager widow's pension not matching Mrs. Tarantino's social and economic ambitions, she scams the Milanese of their money by pretending to be a psychic, because she wants more beautiful furniture, and a new, modern and more beautiful home.

We don't get to know Mrs. Tarantino's Christian name and hence she is less of an individual, more representing a people, a different one; foreigners that we don't know.

Mrs. Tarantino despises her stupid, desperate clients, and uses psychology intuitively to manipulate them and gives them just enough of "right" answers. This is to lure them into becoming psychologically dependent on her "consultation services", and to come more often, giving up even more of their "Northern" money.

To the viewer, the son (also nameless) is presented as a true psychic and natural born magician, who draws from their common arcane and "foreign" culture of the South to influence the mothers' clients.

Aggressively, the son throws his mother's mock talismans composed of salt and sawdust away, and creates his own, very functional and dangerous ones, by picking soil materials from the subway dirt where his father was killed by the onrushing capitalist-industrialist train.

He will use photographs and objects to "get under the clients' skin", and dip into their souls, creating havoc, by first cutting out their eyes from a photo of man to go blind; he will stab the abdomen of a woman in another photo causing her to give birth to an expected child deaf, dumb and blind, while also raping a customer because he desires her body.

The violated young woman's name we do get to know, therefore she is one of "us". Yet she comes back for more "guidance" as her psyche deteriorates.

The son will also put his mother's stockings over his head like that of a robber wanting to not be recognized, to get access to the mother's vagina by tying, raping her to satisfy his youthful and lonely penis often erect, and by doing so extracting more of her accumulated knowledge of Sicilian "magic knowledge" out of her, to get back at the people who destroyed his family.

The more the Sicilian culture is put as "spells" and "talismans" on the Milanese who come for "spiritual guidance", the worse the Milaneses' lives become, until they go totally mad and psychotic.

(Northern) Media outlets of the times when this film was made, not uncommonly reported on the "underachievement" of the industrial production performance in the South, and stories about Southerner workers not producing even one months' worth of a yearly production volume - compared to that of workers Northern cities like Milan - have been persistent and commonplace. The Italian Northerners have historically often frowned upon the Italian Southerners for their "laziness" and general "third world behaviour". In the film, Sicilian fake "pensioners" queue to get their benefits, feigning disabilities or committing other types of fraud, as police comes identifying the fraudsters and brutally arrest them and carry them away. So yes, there is a racist element to the situation in this film, although it in fact is open to personal interpretation as to the director Giulio Questi's personal stance.

The easiest view to take - and the most difficult for a director to convey - is that Questi sees the conflict from a position of understanding, more than blaming the Milanese or the Sicilians for their incompatibility and for the conflict.

But if we are biased we may, for instance, see a Marxist critique of the capital forces of a Fascist state (where capital and government have merged), which inhumane power we can clearly see towards the end when soldiers start shooting at civilians, and thus display another facet of Fascism: the carrying out of the capitalist state's dictates and policies by use of its monopolistic violence.

The alternative interpretation is also possible, albeit more difficult to adopt: That the socio-economic pressure on the North by the South must be handled in any which way, or else the people will all "go mad", or the society which they constitute will become even more dysfunctional.

The film opens with a statement from Questi: "To the viewers, This film is not a story. It's a card game. This is why the beginning is not credible nor is the ending. You are the players. Play well and win."

The card game refers to the Tarot game used extensively by Mrs. Tarantino, more than a poker game card deck. Thus we, in front of the movie screen - and also the corporate Fascist state - play with more than markers or money, we play with life and death, happiness and sorrows.

A guess is that a solution to Questi's film, and the card game he presents as a puzzle, would have been a separatist one between autonomous regions living in peace or competitively - sometimes at war with each other, as in history - rather than having a united Italy where the the populations of the North and the South are held as hostage by a Fascist super government forcing all peoples' cultures to either clash or go extinct in the name of a centralized power. But in regard to the interpretative options of the film, there are probably several other ways to solve Questi's puzzle.

1970's Italian film is a strange trip through 1970 Italy on the verge of modernity, decay, madness and revolution. Widowed witch Mrs. Tarantino is using any method at her disposal to eke out a living as a psychic medium and healer, plying her trade with the help of her more powerfully gifted son. Disgusted by his mother's clients and her obvious use of chicanery, the son begins a late coming of age journey discovering not only who he is but also his true powers.

(**Spoiler Alert**)

The seemingly ambiguous plot is open to interpretation. I certainly can't tell you what the filmmaker wanted to convey - only what I took from it: That the son is actually a familiar created by the mother after the accidental death of the father (during the construction of a subway). The son struggles with themes of power, real magic and identity (actual and sexual). He tests his growing power of arcane knowledge on his mother's seedier clients. Then, after finding no trace of his father in the subway, he curses it by hanging a mobile over the entrance. Then he curses the city with mobiles strung from TV antennas. In the end, he decides to create another familiar in the womb of an attractive victim, which will be his bride. But she dies before it can be delivered. Then the revolution starts (because of the curse?). Or something like that.

The story is told with uncommon imagery like, but not limited to: cross-dressing, bread-men, snakes, amputation, feral children, levitating dishes, tarot cards, peeing, photo retouching, bondage, regurgitated frogs, pantyhose masks, oedipal imagery, breast slashing and a donkey in a hoist.

Man, this movie just hit me right in the brain.

Lucia Bosè (Something Creeping in the Dark) plays Ms. Tarantino, a widow who practices spiritualism. As her son grows older, he learns that the parlor tricks his mom uses to get money out of the marks hide what she can really do, so he forces her to give him the power of magic. Before long, he's stringing all sorts of objects around their apartment building, putting live frogs into a woman's mouth, creating a voodoo bread man and fondling torn-off chicken legs.

He's also obsessed with Tina Aumont from Torso and you know, who can blame him?

Director Giulio Questi was the screenwriter for The Possessed, as well as writing and directing the berserk Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!, which starts with its hero clawing his way out of a mass grave and ends with people being messily melted down by molten gold. He also was behind the equally strange Death Laid an Egg before the failure of this movie ruined his directing career. It would be nine years before he had the chance to make another picture.

This movie starts with these words: "To the viewers, This film is not a story. It's a card game. This is why the beginning is not credible nor is the ending. You are the players. Play well and win."

From what I've found online, people either absolutely love this movie or hate every single minute of it, much like the other films that Questi made. That means that - you guessed it - I loved this mess of a movie. I can't wait for people to reply just how much they disliked it.