Valentina Rosselli (Isabelle de Funès, a young photographer, encounters the witch Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker) one night. Yaga wishes to take Valentina as her lover, and uses her magics to influence the young woman's life.
Soon strange things start to happen to Valentina. She dreams of Nazi firing squads and absurdist boxing matches and has a model fall down dead in the midst of a photo shoot, seemingly killed by her camera.
Valentina goes to visit Baba Yaga at her home, where the floor opens into a bottomless pit. The witch gives Valentina a doll, Annette, incongruously dressed up in S&M garb, telling Valentina to always keep it with her for protection. An increasingly suspicious Valentina, does not heed the advice and the doll is free to transform into human form and murder with its poisoned hair pin…
In some ways director Corrado Farina's job in adapting Guido Crepax's adult fumetti for the screen couldn't be easier.
The artist's comics are 90 per cent of the way to being storyboards already, complete with suggested sound effects, camera set ups and film references galore (Von Stroheim, Godard, Expressionism etc).
All the director needed do, at one level, was translate between the distinct vocabularies of the two media, by taking the artists use of different panel sizes as an indicator for shot duration and editing rhythm for instance.
Indeed, the cinematic quality of Crepax's fumetti had already been recognised by Tinto Brass who had employed the artist to write the treatment for his 1967 Godardian giallo Col Cuore in Gola .
Yet that Brass had not sought to make an adaptation of an existing Crepax work points to the challenge facing the film-maker: How to faithfully translate Crepax's (f|ph)antastical, free-flowing S&M scenarios to the screen respectfully, without relegating them to the level of camp, parody or pornography. (Not that there's anything wrong with any of those in the right context.)
While it's hard to watch the film today without some of the fashions and attitudes raising a smile or eyebrow, one never gets the impression that (unlike say Mario Bava with Diabolik ) Farina is treating the project in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
Baba Yaga must, one suspects, have been a weird experience for both Carroll Baker and Isabelle de Funès as the witch and her target. One suspects that her experience working with Umberto Lenzi on all those gialli must have been good preparation for Baker, while de Funès makes an effective mannequin in the manner of Deneuve in Buñuel's somewhat similarly themed Belle de Jour . As Valentina's boyfriend Arno, George Eastman (AKA Luigi Montifiore) has a comparatively easy if thankless task: be a solid macho presence. As you would expect from the monster of Anthropophagous the Beast and Absurd , he manages.
Though not without the aforementioned precedents and successors – Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno spring to mind, along with Bertrand Blier's Merci Ma Vie (though the last is probably more Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend for the 90s than anything else) – Baba Yaga is truly a one of a kind film.
Even if the movie itself leaves you cold, chances are the ultra-cool score by Piero Umiliani won't. It positively screams "re-issue me"
There are no real issues with sound or picture quality on this NTSC Region 0 DVD from Blue Underground, which presents Baba Yaga in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and mono sound mix. Colours are vibrant, blacks solid and the dialogue, music and effect clear.
The 22 minute interview with Farina packs an enormous amount of information into its running time.
Farina explains how he had known Crepax and his work for a number of years prior to making the film, but felt that none of the previous fumetti styled films really captured the style of the fumetti properly.
After working as a documentary film-maker and assistant director and finally completing his feature debut, the bizarre vampires-as-capitaists allegory They've Changed Faces , he felt the time was right to faithfully bring Crepax to the screen.
Admitting that neither Baker nor de Funès was his first choice actress – the latter being more or less imposed on him by the need to keep the French co-backers happy – he acknowledges that their performances ultimately proved better than he could ever have hoped for, with his real problems coming when the film was in the can. A number of scenes were cut without his approval by the distributors, who then proved to be a declining power without the ability to really promote the film as well as it argubly deserved.
The deleted scenes, amounting to ten minutes in total, are themselves presented as another extra on the DVD, comprising one five minute scene excised in toto and several shorter extensions to scenes that are present in one form or another, including a couple of brief shots of full frontal nudity from both Baker and de Funès. But all told, nothing that would make an obvious difference to the film for better or worse.
Farina's work as a documentarian and understanding of Crepax's fumetti are showcased by the next extra, the 12 minute short "Freud in Color" which discusses the artist's work and places it – and by extension, the film itself, in context.
This process is continued by the nine page comic book to film comparison included as a PDF on the DVD and as a series of stills for on-screen viewing, which intermix Crepax's artwork with stills and shots derived from them.
The traditional trailer and stills gallery round off the DVD nicely.
The only obvious omission is something to put the fumetti and Crepax into their contemporary context post manga, Maus, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and X-Men…
But as is, this a very good DVD package that really shows how well the media can help enhance understanding of and appreciation for a film through well-chosen extras.
There is even an easter egg: On the extras menu select the theatrical trailer option and press right. The camera lens will highlight. Pressing enter brings up a brief interview with Tinto Brass talking about his work with Crepax.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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