When Elaine reaches into her handbag for a cigarette in these opening shots, Biller also plants the first of innumerable visual metaphors. Our witch, we learn very quickly, is haunted by voices and visions, particularly of her werewolf-haired but clean-shaven and unsettlingly smiling ex-husband, Jerry, who appears in the film only in flashback and voiceover. In one of the film’s many nods to Hitchcock, The Love Witch opens with Elaine alone in a car, fleeing her past.
As the title of the film promises, the beautiful, bewitching Elaine will have love, but not, Biller artfully ensures, with the results that she desires. Like Barbi, the beleaguered protagonist that Biller herself played in her 2007 debut feature, Viva, Elaine in The Love Witch struggles with both the men and women in her life to pursue and finally have her will.īut unlike the more outwardly innocent Barbi, Elaine has a crystal clear vision of what her will looks like – and much more powerful means to realize it. Six centuries and more later, director Anna Biller has given us The Love Witch, which eagerly and expertly uses the resources of film to complicate the Wife of Bath’s answer. The form of the Wife’s narrative thus informs its elegantly precise but endlessly resonant meaning: a woman wants her will, and she will have it, whether the men around her will or no. Responding to the often unflattering portraits of women that her fellow (and mostly male) pilgrims had painted, the Wife boldly spends more time telling her own story (of marrying husband after husband to pay her the marriage debt) than she does in telling her actual tale.
Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer gave his adamantly serial bride, the Wife of Bath, almost 1,300 lines of his “Canterbury Tales” to consider this inexhaustible question.