Film Fatale: Morgiana and the Scheming Woman
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A spiteful woman in head-to-toe black who adores graphic liner, lace and sees the world as her enemy: we all know this person, or maybe we are her. Faced with too many personal setbacks, paired with the company of happy people, it can be hard not to become a creeping, looming, Poe-like figure filled with hate and lucid dreams of revenge.
While the insecurity and lust of vengeance feels embarrassing individually, cinema has a great way of easing the blow by crafting enticing, striking women who are similarly filled with hate and schemes: Margot in All About Eve (1940) sipping Martinis and throwing around quick witted jabs to the younger Eve who is coming for her legacy; Madeline and Helen in Death Becomes Her (1992) as they gruesomely fight over a man and go to great, camp lengths to regain their youth; or in more bloody sense, Asami Yamazaki of Audition (1999) expressing in many brutal ways why you should not waste her time.
This type of woman has a specific look. Similar to how young men jump and scream like caged chimps when seeing their incel hero do the Kubrick Stare - be it Fight Club’s Jack or Taxi Driver’s Travis - women are not much better at keeping their cool when the scheming female archetype waltzes onto the screen. After coming across a screenshot of Morgiana (1972) directed by Juraj Herz, I felt an instinctive buzz to immediately sit down and watch. The narrative didn’t matter to me - the details of the makeup and costumes were enough to make me slam my money down and commit. Pencil thin brows arched over blue eyeshadow that pops against pasty pale skin, a deep red lip with an overly defined Cupid’s bow and huge Gibson girl hair; it was clear that Morgiana would be a great deranged woman narrative.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Morgiana is a gorgeous meditation on what it's like to be a sour person, capturing the true theatrics of revenge and embracing the wrath of a mean woman, bows and all. Opening with the lowering of their fathers casket, sisters Klara and Viktoria receive devastating news: most of their fathers estate will be left to Klara. As if Viktoria wasn’t seething enough, she then spies on Klara as Viktoria’s potential lover confesses he wants to be with Klara. Viktoria loves to eavesdrop - she’s wide eyed and looks like a ghost as she listens to the normal people talk - it’s an excellent sight, the dramatics are comical and it unfortunately reminds me of times in my life where I have also lost the plot and became a creature of suspicion and hatred.
“After coming across a screenshot of Morgiana (1972) directed by Juraj Herz, I felt an instinctive buzz to immediately sit down and watch. The narrative didn’t matter to me - the details of the makeup and costumes were enough to slam my money down and commit.”
Like all good plots, what confirms Viktoria’s direction of going on a murder spree is a tarot card reading. The psychic, another extremely glamorous woman with expressionist makeup and big hair straight from a Klimt painting, tells Viktoria: “Money and wealth are close to you. The queen of hearts stands in our way. She’s ahead of you everywhere. It’s up to you to remove what stands between you and wealth”. A scheme to poison Klara commences. Klara is a comical opposite of Viktoria, wearing flowing white dresses with bright ginger hair. She is surrounded by men who want to be with her and dances in her luscious garden with the swans. Even when faced with Viktoria’s jealousy, snide comments and talks of death - she kindly asks if they can just get on, brushing it all off, frustratingly being the bigger person.
In Czech New Wave fashion, Morgiana depicts its gothic fairytale narrative with a surrealist form. As Klara becomes sicker and sicker from Viktoria's poisoning - her delirium is portrayed with multicoloured, blurred shots as she stumbles around. We are even lucky enough to get point of view shots from Viktoria’s siamese cat, who the film is named after. The disorientating perspectives makes the film incredibly nightmarish, if your nightmares also featured delicious costume, makeup and setting.
Although director Herz was self-professedly non-New Wave, it’s hard to separate his filmmaking style from the Czech New Wave movement. Most famously seen in Daisies (1966) directed by Věra Chytilová, a radical story of two women drinking, eating and engaging in destruction in response to a world that is ‘bad’, the genre is characterised by experimentation in form and story. While Herz refuses his connection to the New Wave movement, Morgiana feels like it was created through the same lens of Daisies, most likely because both filmmakers were under the restrictions of communist Czechoslovakia. With creative restrictions comes experimentation, thinking of ways to create a radical film without making it too obvious.
Herz had work shelved due to politics, and in Morgiana, though the original story by Russian author Alexander Grin being that the main character had schizophrenia; the big gotcha being that Viktoria and Klara are the same person, the reveal was forbidden by the Czech administration. Instead, Herz decided to simply have Viktoria and Klara be played by the same actress.
Herz wasn’t too fussed on his creation, as he expressed in a 2010 interview: “Morgiana was one of those exercises, practice really...I didn't really take the film that seriously,” As the high melodrama and campiness may not make Morgiana a renowned classic due to the unfortunate reception of many films of the genre, it hails as a gem that have inspired the innovators of today. The merging of eras with clothing, makeup and setting blurs time; it’s a 70s rendition of 19th century fairytale-europe, allowing the film to stay completely unique in its own fantasy world for decades to come.
A few years after Morgiana, Herz created a beautifully unnerving rendition of Beauty and the Beast, Panna a netvor (1978). Featuring the same costume designer from Morgiana, Irena Greifová, the film feels editorial, especially with the fairytale backdrop. Herz knew how to frame his leading ladies, and Greifová had the ability to say so much about character with clothing. Telling stories set in the past gave Herz a chance to comment on life under strict political control, whilst being discrete enough that it could slip through the cracks.
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum