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The changelings of sexuality, what's a good fairy-tale without them? Out of the Thatcherite cottage and into the primordial woodland (cf. Gilliam's Time Bandits), the portal is a reverie from the ingénue (Sarah Patterson) churning with pubescent tensions, "it's her age." Spiders and frogs and serpents inhabit a land filled with fecundity and decay, though the most dangerous predator remains the lupine lecher who's "hairy on the inside." Fables within reveries: The groom who steps out on his honeymoon to return years later with a mighty appetite, critters in powdered wigs for the pregnant sorceress' revenge, the Devil himself (Terence Stamp) arch as can be in his Rolls-Royce. Granny (Angela Lansbury) can spin a cautionary yarn, Mother (Tusse Silberg) has her own take on the Gothic battle of the sexes: "If there's a beast in men, it meets its match in women, too." Perrault and Freud for Angela Carter's feminist analysis of folklore, Neil Jordan provides a Waterhouse flash with an elegant and grisly camera. (Demy's The Pied Piper and Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre are valuable models.) The scarlet shawl scampers through moody greens, stumbling upon some arcane symbolism: The rodent in the dollhouse, the mirror in the bird's nest, the severed visage in the vat of milk. Away from the straight path waits the huntsman with the compass (Micha Bergese), he races to Granny's house to wait for the heroine whose virginity "would have turn'd his skin," as Byron puts it. The snout sprouting out of bloody sinew and the claw bursting through the satin slipper, already Jordan's poetry has the metamorphosis of desire—when the girl's dreams finally fuse with reality, her elating sense of release is inseparable from horror. "Jeez, what big teeth you got!" With David Warner, Stephen Rea, Brian Glover, Graham Crowden, and Shane Johnstone.
--- Fernando F. Croce |