A portrait of a slightly weird guy living with his mother, who is a fake clairvoyant. He is discovering his supernatural talents.Unsettling is the right word for this film. People, waiting to collect their welfare, are being kidnapped without a reason. A metro stops in a tunnel, people start banging on the windows from the outside. Unsettling is also the relationship between the protagonist and his mother. She is hardly angry when he ties her to the bed or makes love with one of her costumers in front of her.The second part is even less comprehensible than the first part already is. He collects stuff and people seem to get more and more crazy. It is lovely bizarre, still not the David Lynch or Luis Buñuel kind of bizarre, but sometimes not far from it. There's a fascinating piece of cinema with a monotonous gypsy player and the mother suddenly coughing up frogs. Or the one with people waiting silently outside the door, one man glances over his shoulder.I found it hard to understand why things were happening like this. Usually films have too much explanation, this film is an example of the opposite. There's not much sense of logic. I guess one of the reasons was the unbalanced editing. Some more interesting, surreal scenes don't have enough time to work, and less interesting scenes could have been removed. Especially the final could have been better.Nevertheless, this is a slow, but surprisingly entertaining film, subtle and yet politically incorrect. This might not come as a surprise as the director, Giulio Questi, is also the man behind a thriller on a chicken farm (Death laid an egg, 1968) and a cult western with gay cowboys (Django kill..., 1967). These were the only three films he made. He was the uncompromising kind of director and that's why his films are still unique. This film is supported with great performances and music. Lucia Bosé is very good as the over-protective mother, and Maurizio degli Esposti is just as fine as the weird son with the feminine hairdo (he only played in four films). Also Tina Aumont, famous for Fellini's Casanova, but in fact specialized in playing parts in the weirdest section of 70's cinema. I rate it 7/10 for mystery.

I was following Arcana for the first half. It told the story of a psychic and her son. The psychic appears to be a fake, running a con game on her clients (although she does mention that her mother was a true witch). The son is odd, sometimes dressing in women's clothes and stealing photographs from his mother's clients. The relationship between mother and son is charged with sexual tension. The story begins to change when the son becomes fixated on a pretty girl, engaged to be married, who comes to the mother for a reading. It was there the film lost me.In the second half, the son begins to take a dominant role. Is he crazy, psychic, running a con, or some strange combination of all of these? There are flashbacks to the countryside where the mother's mother works her magic with a house full of gypsies and a donkey outside suspended in air. The film builds to an ending so grim that it could be described as apocalyptic, if it is to be taken literally. The film opens with a scrawl stating that the film is a card game and not all of it is real. I was left confused by both the ending and the film as a whole.Arcana has much to recommend it. Lucia Bose as the mother is excellent and she gives the performance her all. In the country scene, she looks to be actually removing toads from her mouth. If that is not a special effect, then Miss Bose is one fearless actress! Furthermore, the film is eye catching with the hypnotic country scene being the stand out (catchy gypsy music too). An often intriguing film, but the ambiguity proved too much for me.

Lucia Bose is one of the all-time icons of European cinema, and a lost but essential showcase for her talents is Giulio Questi's experimental ARCANA, a film that lived up to its title. Having recently seen a full-length (102-minute) version, I recommend it heartily.Unfortunately not only the film but Bose's rep has gotten mislaid in film history. Most young fans today could recite a list of starlet Edwige Fenech's credits, yet Bose, who appeared in many classics by Antonioni, Juan Antonio Bardem, Bolognini, Bunuel, Cavani, Cocteau, Duras and Fellini (just to start off the alphabet!) is not recognized in her lifetime.She toplines ARCANA as a fake spiritualist, working with her weird, arrested-development son to make a living with séances and private readings. Midway through the film we see some levitating plates and other housewares to indicate that the son is actually in touch with the spirit world, but basically the film unfolds in the interesting genre of SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON, until director Questi literally goes crazy in the 2nd tempo.The morbid atmosphere is intense, though this is not a traditional horror opus by any means. Questi rather is a surrealist in the vein of Arrabal, Alexandro Jodorowsky and other midnight-movie favorites, and even includes his oddest fetish, the eggs & chicken from his most famous (and still applauded) work DEATH LAYS AN EGG. An unsung auteur is editor Franco Arcalli, whose presence on a film I have found nearly guarantees both weirdness and quality, whether working with Antonioni, Bellocchio, Bertolucci or Cavani.The off-color material included here is probably what led to its obscurity, even in a world drenched with full-out pornography. I guess the material is harder to tolerate in a "real" film than in actual porn, which current inversion in tastes has put on an "anything goes" type of pedestal. At any rate, Questi has our hero Maurizio Degli Esposito, who looks to be about 25, routinely wandering down the hallway carrying a big butcher knife, to sleep with mama Bose because "he's afraid".-MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD- Questi ends the first tempo of the film, at just under the hour mark, with a horrific payoff where Esposito ties up mom's arms and legs in bondage mode, rips open her bedclothes to expose a breast and brandishes the knife -quite a cliffhanger.Eventually in the second tempo we see that Bose is okay, and the implied rape/incest is left hanging for the viewer to wonder about (definitely the best strategy). A frequent client, beautiful young Tina Aumont, has been spied on by Esposito during his misanthropic subway rides, and he sexually assaults her during one of her palm readings by Bose, with mom failing to come to the girl's aid. Final reels become increasingly abstract, with a whole group of people awaiting a séance going Living-Theater-style nuts (under Esposito's influence no doubt), while he corrupts the neighbor kids who hang out in their tenement's hallway. Bose conducts a ritualistic abortion (!) on client Aumont, and film climaxes with a seeming revolution outside in which townsfolk are pitted against the military, resulting in a nihilistic finish of Bose cut down by gunfire.One can well imagine a dumbstruck film festival audience plodding out of the cinema back in 1972 after sitting through this assault on the senses, lured in the first place by the participation of then essential European stars Bose and Aumont. Esposito, who is handsome but perhaps typecast as terminally strange, didn't have much of a career, though I see he subsequently starred opposite the divine Laura Antonelli in another weird, lost film SIMONA, a picture never released in America despite Antonelli's huge success several years later that opened up the vaults of her past work. (NOTE: SIMONA has recently been imported belatedly on DVD by Mya.)Bose is a true Earth Mother here, the type of role that normally would have been assigned at the time to Sophia Loren but because of the sordid material would not have even been worth submitting to that regal legend. She is unafraid to look "ugly" (impossible) in closeups, but has a chance here to let it all hang out in one of her greatest roles. Aumont is beautiful as ever, lending her usual sexploitation quotient to the proceedings.Questi's symbolism and motifs remain alarmingly obscure; especially in this case Esposito's cross dressing, making faces in his mirror and his morbid fixation on family-style photos and photos of hands. There is perhaps a social/political dimension driven home by repeated scenes of pickax toting workers underground on the subway, but a recurring image of a donkey being hoisted by pulleys up to the third floor had me scratching my head.The musical score is one of the film's strongest assets, including a weird violinist on screen who serves almost a pied piper function and is essential to creating the surrealistic mood.

Mrs.Tarantino is the widowed wife of a poor worker from southern Italy living with her creepy son in a shabby block of industrial Milan.She plans to make money exploiting as a charlatan a crowd of rich dullards looking for supernatural advice like tarot and hand reading.The mother is an expert in magic rituals and cleverly uses it to lure her prey,while her son is a psychic.The problem arises when the son falls in love with her mother's client and uses his arcane powers to gain her love with devastating consequences...Extremely obscure and forgotten Italian horror movie with some nice surreal touches and often implied Oedipux complex.The score by Berto Pisano is fantastic with phenomenal violin motif.I hope that "Arcana" will be released on DVD soon.8 out of 10.