Arcana

Italy, 1972

Director: Giulio Questi

Screenplay: Giulio Questi,

Franco Arcalli

Cast:

Lucia Bosè (Mamma), Maurizio Degli Esposti (Son), Tina Aumont (Brenda)

Genre: Horror/Drama

Plot

A Sicilian widow living in Milan (Mrs. Tarantino) and her disturbing twenty-year-old son with mediumistic powers have set up a business of spiritualistic and fortune-telling consultations. Clients, attracted by advertisements in the press, come for group or individual sessions. The woman (played by Lucía Bosé) does not really have any supernatural powers, she is simply a charlatan, who “reads hands” and “casts cards” with the only help of her imagination; but her son (a kind of young hairless Rasputin whose name is never revealed) is able to perceive the occult. In the “group therapies”, the clients often enter a trance state, hypnotized by the atmosphere and the power of suggestion, but this does little to solve their problems.

A young woman who is about to get married goes alone to have a “fortune teller” prepare a “magic filter” for her. The “fortune teller” invents a useless concoction, and the son, angered, realizes that it is a simple “placebo” and threatens his mother with a knife and tying her to the bed to reveal the ingredients of the ‘real’ filter… Among the components of the “potion” are, it seems, the venom of a snake, or the dust of some stones found in the subway tunnel…

Comment

Very strange film full of surreal imagery, whose story is confusingly threaded through the introduction of elements unrelated to the main plot, such as the scenes of the donkey hoisted in the country house, the violinist of Balkan rhythms, the workers in the subway tunnel or the intervention of the military towards the end of the film.

Among the few works of the rather unknown Giulio Questi is a very interesting and atypical western, very violent and surrealistic (in the style of “El Topo”), called “Se sei vivo spara!” (1967) (a.k.a. “Django kill!”), starring the Cuban Tomas Milian (very famous in Italy for his excellent characterization of a typical Roman hoodlum).

The scene in which, to the rhythm of violin beats, toads begin to come out of the mouth of the “seer” is worth mentioning.

In “Arcana” (where a possible incestuous relationship between the mother and the eccentric son is subtly hinted at) there are similarities with the filmic work of Fernando Arrabal (“Viva la muerte”, “J’irai comme un cheval fou”…), and his “teatro pánico”, deeply influenced in turn by the surrealist cinema of Luis Buñuel.