Puffball (2007) - 4/4

After being out of the feature film business for a long time, master filmmaker Nicolas Roeg returns with a very weird film called Puffball. This title refers not to a furry woodland creature, but to a form of mushroom that grows into an edible, watermelon-sized, white ball, in appearance not unlike the moon. There are no knife-wielding midgets or horny meteorologists in this one, but it may be Roeg's strangest film yet. Roeg focuses a microscope on life itself, like the puffball both beautiful and hideously fungal in its monstrous, struggling messiness from conception to death in endless cycles. Roeg spares us not one intra-vaginal blast of semen. Not surprisingly, given a subject matter as broad as life itself, Puffball is a drama, a thriller, a comedy, a supernatural horror, a fantasy and more.

Puffball concerns an architect named Liffey (Kelly Reilly) returning to her roots in the Irish country. She's purchased an old cottage and is using her architectural skills to design her dream house where she will live with her boyfriend. Her closest neighbour is Mabs (Miranda Richardson), a middle-aged woman with a teen daughter, twin little girls, and a desire to get pregnant with a son. Mabs's mother, Molly, used to live in the cottage, where she lost a son in a fire. Now the slightly-unhinged woman uses pagan rituals to 'help' Mabs get pregnant with a replacement son. When the magic doesn't work--because magic is nonsense and all--Molly determines Liffey's taking over of the cottage is the cause. Not only that, but a defective condom leads to Liffey getting pregnant. That bitch! New and sinister magic will be required.

Now my tone there was slightly tongue-in-cheek and there's a reason. Despite concerning a lot of serious issues about procreation and having a few harrowing dramatic moments, there's something darkly comical about the attempts to witchcraft Liffey's child into Mabs. The rituals themselves are bizarre enough that even Mabs' teen daughter grows increasingly disgusted with them. And not only do the amateur witches keep getting misinformed as to the fluctuating state of Liffey's pregnancy, but Liffey seemingly gets pregnant by two different guys in a space of three weeks when Mabs can't get pregnant at all. While pregnancy-envy is a serious thing and Roeg does take it seriously, at the same time he recognizes how ridiculous it is when Molly calls Liffey a bitch for taking Liffey's own fetus from Mabs. As though there were a limited amount of fertility in this corner of the universe. But that's magic thinking for you.

Roeg leaves it ambiguous as to whether there is really any magic at work. He refines his famous cut-up shooting style here to emphasize the interconnectedness of individuals. This sense is strong enough that one would be justified asserting magical connections. For instance, Molly seems to be aware of the exact moment Liffey discovers her dead son's baby booties in the cottage basement. There are a few such instances and one wonders if it is real synchronicity or a result of Roeg's cutting.

Roeg also develops a level of symbolic interconnectedness. Superimposition links the interior of the cottage and the architectural models Liffey keeps with the interior of her womb. A mystical stone called the 'Well of Odin' is linked with the vaginal passage, perhaps with the aperture of cameras, and with some of the mystical notions expressed in the film. A total filmmaker, like Lynch, Roeg uses the soundtrack to advantage as well. Roeg also employs a sort of aural superimposition, whereby the ghostly sounds of a little boy are heard at certain moments throughout the film.

Then there are the puffballs. These too are linked to the womb both in the appearance of pregnancy and again by means of superimposition of a fetus over the puffball. The puffballs are visually linked with the moon, which is in the first shot of the film. The moon, of course, is tied to the motif of cycles, menstrual cycles, the cycle of life. This is what the film is ultimately about. Life is represented in all stages, from the fetus, through the little girls, the teenager, the fertile young woman, the middle-aged woman, the elderly woman and death. Then life starts again. It is all interconnected. It's not magic. But when one considers the sheer implausibility of any single human life coming to exist and the almost infinite odds against it, the result of that struggle feels quite close to magic. It's not a wonder something so mysterious could drive one to witchcraft.

But Roeg doesn't allow just one perspective on procreation to shine through. Liffey is flatly disdainful of procreation; the development of her cottage is her substitute for childbearing. Surely a woman needn't be defined by childbearing. For Mabs and her mother, procreation is everything. "Conceiving's what drives a man," Molly says. Mabs' sister Carol holds the truthful view that some women seem to just need to be pregnant and are less interested in the result of that pregnancy. We also get the perspective of medical science, refreshingly lacking sentimentality. Roeg takes no sides, but allows for a pluralism of attitudes toward procreation.

However, what will be uncomfortable is how Roeg's distance studies and scrutinizes the female human as an animal. The females, with their desires to be pregnant, their sexual urges, and many of their activities, sometimes come across as mere animals, silly, pitiable, and vulgar. This may say more about myself than the film, but at times I saw Liffey, and to a lesser extent Mabs, as just a 'stupid animal' rather than a person with the dignity that entails. Of course, procreation doesn't allow for a great deal of conventional dignity. Perhaps it is the conventional notion of dignity and not the 'aberrant' behaviour that needs to be done away with. Humans are animals, after all.

It might be evident by this point in the discussion that males don't play a major part in the film. That is correct. This is a matriarchal film, with most of the tensions between the women and all of the tensions about the women. Molly's view that "conceiving's what drives a man" almost seems true. They're the playthings of the women, used for sex and generally quite submissive. There are two exceptions. There is the doctor. But he's not in the context of a relationship. His presence is merely professional. He represents medical science in a manner tantamount to allegory. The other is Liffey's boss and mentor, Lars (Donald Sutherland). He seems to step in from another film and totally steals the scenes he's in. He's not connected with the plot, but rather with the themes. He has two brief-but-magnetic appearances as a sort of amateur mystic reminding Liffey and the audience that "we know nothing." He seems to represent a position neither masculine nor feminine, but somehow beyond both.

To some extent Puffball is also about place. Because life can't take place nowhere and where it does take place transforms a place. In fact, there is no such thing as place in a purely physical world, is there? There is space. Mathetical space occupied by objects. When conscious beings enter a space and begin to transform it, make it their own, it becomes a place. That place resonates with the people who have shaped it and influences its progress as new people inhabit it, feel it, and develop it in new ways. If there's one good thing that can be said about Liffey--an otherwise supercilious and selfish human being I can't imagine anyone wanting to be within fifty feet of--it's that she understands and respects the significance of place. Unfortunately, the power of the place she's found herself meddling with is what gets her in much trouble.

Nicolas Roeg said in interviews Puffball doesn't belong to a genre: it's a film about life. I believe he accomplished what he set out to do. Puffball manages to be incredibly intricate and yet terribly messy all at once. It's a film full of ideas, full of paradoxes, full of beauty, and full of ugliness. Just like life.