Puffball

It’s been near on 18 years since Nicholas Roeg made a movie for the mass audience, even though his return feature Puffball is unlikely to get much attention. Roeg picks up a novel by the ever popular Fay Weldon and delivers his own somewhat warped perspective of things, and it’s a strange mix at that.  Funded by the National Lottery, The Irish Film Fund, and a Canadian Television Channel; the movie then is kind of delivered to a Cornish based film unit, though the movie itself is set and filmed in Ireland. If you’re unfamiliar with Fay Wheldon her novels usually cover witchcraft and the occult prime examples include TV or Movie versions of the novels Growing Rich and The Life And Loves Of The She Devil; but Wheldon has a comic view to her depictions, however Nicholas Roeg has no time for comedy.

 

Puffball is a most unusual piece of filmmaking, its story centres around a young woman called Liffey (Kelly Riley) who is building her dream cottage in the calm and serine Irish Countryside. For Liffey the mistake comes when she encounters the neighbours a family almost ruled by Molly (Rita Tushingham) a Celtic witchcraft obsessed busy body, whose daughter Mabs (Miranda Richardson) longs after three daughters to have a boy.  Having been defiled by her boyfriend Richard (Oscar Pearce) on a ceremonial stone Molly begins to work witchcraft against Liffey for not only showing a lack of respect to the stone, but seemingly because she is simply there. Things become considerably worse for Liffey when Molly sends Tucker (Mabs husband played by William Houston) round for a bit of how’s your father witches brew disguised as wine in hand.

 

I finished watching Puffball obliviously unaware of whether I had watched an amazing piece of art house style cinema, or the biggest celluloid atrocity of all time. While the story was easy enough to piece together the way Roeg goes about telling the story does rely on a certain amount of head scratching. While aside from the awkward meandering of the story your then plummeted into the world of the unexplained when a series of potential plotlines are disregarded as readily as Liffey discards her underwear.

 

To add to an already strange debacle we are then thrust the pleasure of Donald Sutherland as Lars, who is Lars? What is the magical effect that the cottage and Liffey has on him? Why does he know the location of several things? And where on earth is he meant to come from because his accent moves from Canadian to Irish at the drop of a hat? All these questions remain un-concluded by the movies finale and I feel kind of robbed, especially considering I always rather enjoy the spectacle of Sutherland in a movie.

 

While the flame haired Kelly Reilly as Liffey offers a sumptuous visual spectacle for us guys, I wonder what if anything the women viewers would think of her. From beginning the movie in a fairly non sexual manner she is suddenly being thrust around all over the place and in every position, hats off to Roeg however who somehow makes quite explicit scenes completely tame with not so much as nipple or lower lady parts to be seen, although he does focus on the striding male nude backside a little too much for my liking. A scene in a barn with Tucker echoes Roeg’s earlier Don’t Look Now sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, it’s a strange entanglement that kind of borderlines rape above anything else.

 

I personally felt that I was involved in some sort if “in” joke that everyone else (movie cast and crew) were all aware of but as an outsider I was the brunt of some sort of clever and offensive bit of mickey taking. Rita Tushingham runs around with all manner of varieties of mushroom and other sorts of phallic shaped fungi, the beast fungi being the Puffball of the movies titles is not only picked and cooked, but on a number of occasions attacked during the movie, on one occasion hacked up with a sickle and on another stamped, and rather like a balloon nothing is inside the Puffball; so how on earth do they eat it?

 

Roeg’s creative camerawork and special effects are quite bizarre, a model of the cottage Liffey is working on quite often has a superimposed foetus working at a desk, a red aura frequently dominates the centre of the screen, and in case you are rather unsure what has been going on with Liffey when she is wrestling with one of two men, your are given an internal view of her just in time to see a rocket launch of ejaculate making its way towards her ovaries, nice!

 

Often one accused of being one to sit on the fence in my movie reviews, I have to today resolve myself to that position. I sort of loved it, I kind of hated it but for some unknown reason I really want to watch it again. Yes I didn’t really get it, yes there were a lot of baffling factors; but maybe, just maybe next time round I might be privy to the joke all the screen characters shared. But then just like Alice I always like to believe in three impossible things before breakfast.