Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Nicolas Roeg's discordant anti-thriller 'Puffball' is an eerie tale of conception and covert coupling filmed in his unmistakable style, not even slightly mellowed or distilled for the 21st Century. Still powerful with a driving erotic charge and still taking the everyday and ordinary and making it seem strange.
'Puffball's plot is simple but intelligent (yes readers, you've got to THINK about this one, sorry): mad-stare Mabs is desperate for another child; she has 3 girls already and longs for a boy. Her mother, Molly, a slightly Wiccan mad-woman troubled by a tragic event in her past, decides to assist using an ancient hex but inadvertently knocks up a completely different woman, Liffey, a lithe architect renovating a nearby cottage.
Much angst and intrigue ensues as the two ladies (and their respective spouses) go head to head in a psychological and symbolic battle for the unborn child.
Into this already heated environ Roeg introduces much organic and biological detail: eye-popping sequences of real sex (filmed inside the women!), insinuating a supernatural connection between the cloudy rushes of sperm flooding the cervix, and the releasing of the giant puffball's spores (the old witch's element in her increasingly eccentric spells), the dominant symbol of fertility throughout the film.
Kelly Riley is lustrously sexy as Liffey; her physicality proving the catalyst for the dream-like events which unfold following her arrival.
Miranda Richardson is the delusional Mabs; driven to fluence and unorthodoxy in her frantic attempts to conceive.
Molly is played with skanky wraithishness by Rita Tushingham, all woodland twitchery and phallic hexes, desperate in the belief that her own pain will ultimately pass if she can cause Mabs to cop for a womb-full.
There's some blokes about the place, but they're not really important beyond occasionally donating copious amounts of man-seed to further facilitate the story-line. This is a film about real women - and it's not a rom-com!
Serious adult themes are addressed and enlarged upon from the female perspective with no sense of voyeurism or amusement. Sex is presented grittily and naturalistically, there's no sweeping orchestra and mounting soft-focus passion for Liffey. Even so, she behaves responsibly; using a condom while making out with her boyfriend only to find its effectiveness has been compromised by witchery and into the bun-club she swiftly goes - much to her initial horror.
She then drunkenly gets it rough on a straw lined barn floor from Mabs' handyman husband. Fuelled by home-brew fire-water, and fertility rituals being secretly performed in the woods by Molly and a naked virgin..(ooh, er!).
At this point Donald Sutherland pops his head round the door, just as the films final disturbing twists and turns begin to find their marks.
'Puffball' is intense. If I've made it sound like rural-porn I apologise, but without the sex scenes the film would lose a lot of its impact and distinctive tone.
(nb:Region O is the way to go if you're in the colonies - some of this stuff would be problematic at the very least, for the MPAA - and a cut version would make little sense)
The cast are universally fab, the low-key special effects are memorable, and Roeg's laissez-faire direction indicates powerfully the genius of 'Walkabout' and 'Don't Look Now' is still bubbling, alive with ideas and purpose.
And of course there's a moral: if you're thinking of messing with Mother Nature in her wisdom...don't.
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