Puffball

February 26, 2010 IMDB Comment: Hesitant Womb Tattoo

*** This review may contain spoilers *** I sometimes mention films in which architecture plays a role. This fascinates me. I believe that the next generation of cinema will be highly spatial, with context in surroundings becoming more important.

Welles' "Othello" used space in ways that both implied dangerous conscious reflection and showed the constraints of the world that drive the tragedy. Greenaway's "Belly" used architecture in more visceral way, merging the urge of forms with the relations among components of a human.

This film here goes even further. It is no wonder that it is Roeg's least accessible movie, sometimes considered a failure. I recommend it. Here come some spoilers; I think it best for you to not read this before you have seen it.

The character in this case is a house in Ireland, a very specific place on the border between the two religions. This is a place where the pre-Christian notions from Viking magic are still recognized and there is a tradition that the Celtic nuns were witches in this vein.

A young woman from London buys the dilapidated house. She is an architect who worked in the firm run by Donald Sutherland's character. Something traumatic happened to the two of them, most likely an affair and she has left to find herself. That involves rebuilding this cottage.

We are told that she will keep the outside as it is, but completely re-arrange the insides. Very quickly, the magic of the place conflates this building and its insides with her body, the "insides" being her womb. The cottage had been owned by Rita Tushingham's character where she and husband lived with two daughters and a son. A fire in the building killed the boy. The family moved to the adjacent farm. At the time of the story, we have Rita as an old, somewhat demented witch, living with her son in law and one of her daughters (Miranda Richardson), who in turn has two daughters. The other sister is unmarried and works in the office of the town's obstetrician.

The old witch is obsessed with having a son. Nearby is magical stone with a vaginal hole. By touching your beloved through this hole, you make a bargain with Odin. The area is scattered with globular fungi about a foot in diameter, giving the film its name. That is where the story starts, and this is all revealed economically.

The cottage is conflated with the young woman. The mother (Rita) and her daughter (Miranda) share a womb and magic is wrought to impregnate the woman architect/house and somehow transmute the male embryo from her to them. Along the way, there is lots of sex, sometimes magical and dreamed which every time ends with internal shots of ejaculation, followed by continuing shots within the shared womb of of the developing souls. This womb in turn is conflated with the puffballs around the place, locally called the devil's eyeball.

The plot is defeated by Rita's granddaughter who is newly fertile herself. This all is really complicated in terms of narrative. There are multiple magical forces, shifting identities, a rather amazing role of music and musical magic. Twins and twining galore.

It is confusing and intended to be so because it is from the point of view of the woman- building. The film is not there for the story, though. It is there so that Roeg can explore this notion of creation as space, story as birth, actor as magical token. What a trip.

I can recommend this to you if you have the ability to give form agency, to see this from the side of the magic. I will warn off any women who are pregnant or soon to be, as it surely will produce nightmares.