What sort of mental picture have you formed from the title? Are you picturing a cute girly cartoon? Wrong. It’s a dark, twisted, sexually charged pseudo-supernatural “thriller” from Nic Roeg, who had previously created some notable films like Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now, Castaway and Bad Timing, all in the period 1971-1986. This was not the work of THAT Roeg, but of an 80-year-old man who had lost a lot of the zip from his fastball. And he wasn’t exactly Nolan Ryan to begin with.
So what’s the deal with the title? The Puffball is a type of wild mushroom which resembles a woman’s swollen belly, and this is a film about pregnancy.
Or something.
I’m not really sure what it’s about, to tell you the truth. I’m not even positive that the writer and director knew, because it is supposed to be adapted from a book by Fay Weldon, and from what I have been able to determine (I haven’t read it), that book is brimming with wit and clever dialogue. Although the script for this film was written by the son of the late Weldon, I see no sign of wit, and gathered not the vaguest inkling that the writer or Roeg tried to put any ironic distance between themselves and this preposterous story about Norse mythology, Celtic voodoo, aphrodisiacs, rabid stable couplings, stolen spirit-children, sperm, and rocks with holes in them. I suppose the self-important humorlessness should come as no surprise. Roeg was in the film business for fifty years and continually demonstrated that he lacked even the slightest sense of humor.
Of all Roeg’s earlier films, Don’t Look Now is the one most similar to Puffball. Puffball takes the earlier film’s premise of a normal young couple trapped in a menacing, ominous Venice and transports the couple to the menacing, ominous Irish countryside, where they unexpectedly create a pregnancy and stir up deep feelings of envy in the local harridans, especially a woman who is trying futilely to become pregnant and feels that the outsider has stolen her child.
There were exceptions among the critics, but most of the scribes who profess to like Roeg’s earlier films found this one to be like an unintentional parody of them, with all of the director’s familiar devices exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. There is, for example, obvious sexual symbolism, some of it not so symbolic. Come to think of it, it’s not really symbolism when you can see sperm squirting into a womb from the inside, is it? Let’s just call it sexual imagery. There are several seconds of what appears to me to be an actual penis violating an actual vulva, as shot in extreme close-up, porn style, but disguised by fancy colored lenses and an absence of hair. Or maybe it is symbolism and it’s actually something extremely similar to a penis penetrating something extremely similar to a vagina, in which case it takes the award for the most heavy-handed symbolism of all time, since it looks exactly like real coitus. This is far beyond the ol’ “train entering a tunnel” device.
And the symbolism is actually subtle compared to the stereotypical Irish rurals and the oppressive Celtic musical cues!
If Roeg fans found this movie difficult to watch, you can imagine how I felt, because I don’t even like his “classics.” I always find his narratives jumbled, his themes too-too serious and self-important, his execution very close to high camp, and the overall effect inevitably soporific. I mean, c’mon. I sat through two hours of Don’t Look Now to find out that Sutherland’s vision of his dead child was actually an evil dwarf. Worst “reveal” ever!
As I pointed out in my review of Don’t Look Now:
You know what the explanation really was? There was a serial killer wondering around Venice, skulking in and out of the shadows, and that is whom Sutherland mistook for the ghost of his daughter. So what’s so odd about that? I’ll tell you. The serial killer was an evil dwarf who looked exactly like a ten year old girl. So what’s so unlikely about that? Well, I might have bought into it partially, except that the serial killer skulked around Venice in a shiny red overcoat. I know that I’m neither short enough nor evil enough to think like an evil dwarf, but if I were an evil serial-killing dwarf, I’d try to dress a little bit less conspicuously.
The acclaimed English film director Nicolas Roeg (often referred to in short as Nick Roeg) suffered from dementia toward the end of his life. According to published biographical information, Roeg died on 23 November 2018 at the age of 90, from dementia while in a nursing home in London
Lol Scoop tell us how you really feel! I love freaky shit so Roeg is one of my favorite directors, & got a cavalcade of babes naked in his movies: Anita Pallenberg (Performance), Candy Clark (Man Who Fell To Earth), Amanda Donohoe (the OTHER Castaway, 1986), not to mention the legendarily hot fuck scene (“Did they REALLY do it?”) with Julie Christie & Donald Sutherland in Scoop’s hated Don’t Look Now, teenage Jenny Agutter skinny dipping in Walkabout, plus Theresa Russell, who he’d later marry, in a score of 80s-90s movies – but for me nothing tops Mimi Rogers getting a rubdown from Bryan Brown over every inch of her MILF bod in Full Body Massage
He is one of the best directors for sex and nudity. In that respect, I wish we had him back. The nudity you mentioned is some of the best in film history. The internet is a wonderful thing. You can now watch all of those scenes without having to sit through his mediocre movies. I don’t think any of those would be worth watching without the nudity. The man had no concept of timing or narrative, and no sense of humor. Some people say that his fragmented story-telling was intentional. That may be true, but I doubt it was with artistic aspirations. I suspect that Roeg, like Antonioni, was just incapable of telling a story.
Imagine sitting through Full Body Massage if Mimi kept her clothes on, for example.
That said, he did do some beautiful work as a cinematographer, despite having been fired by David Lean.
What impressed me was that he married Theresa Russell when he was fifty-two years old and the lovely Ms Russell was all of twenty-five.
Lucky bugger.
Also, there’s the recurring rumor that Jagger and Pallenberg were actually making the two-backed in Performance, causing some serious tension with Keef.
There’s actually footage of their sex scene (with very boyish co-star Michele Breton) that never made the final cut that’s on the recent Criterion of Performance, in the extra on the co-director Donald Cammell – it’s a late 90s BBC docu so I have NO idea how they found that; story I’d heard the full footage was shown at some early 70s Euro “erotic” film fest & won an award, but that may be just urban legend
Cammell did alright on his own: rare nudity from Julie Christie in Demon Seed, plus the famous Joan Chen/Anne Heche love scene in Wild Side