Morgiana tells the twisted tale of sisters Klára and Viktoria, torn apart by jealousy, greed and malice. When Klára inherits their father’s estate, leaving Viktoria with the wind battered, remote country house, Viktoria seethes. When the man Viktoria loves falls in love with Klára, Viktoria boils. And when Klára continues to love her sister, to turn her sweet, naive attention to her, with no understanding of the hatred Viktoria feels for her, Viktoria decides to take action.
What follows is a morbidly beautiful tale of murder, madness and repression. It is often labelled the Czech Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and this is a more than fair comparison. The competition between the sisters shares the same twisted logic, with Viktoria seeing Klára as the source of all her misery. Viktoria cannot accept that she is the cause of her own unhappiness and so externalises her inner rage and resentment onto her sister.
This has instantly taken a place on my favourite films of all time list, in a coveted spot alongside Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Haunting.
The story is deliciously Gothic, full of draughty houses, secrets and death. The film itself is also visually transfixing. The use of colour and uneasy perspectives to illustrate Klára’s descent into her mysterious illness is bewitching. The costume design is breathtaking, the use of the eponymous Morgiana’s cat’s eye view is a whimsical choice that adds more to the film than you might expect, and the locations chosen allow the perfectly perverse privilege of Viktoria and her peers to be evoked in vivid relief. This is a story of a rich person’s madness, surrounded by idle people spending endless days filled with picnics and parties, with nothing to worry about and thus nothing to attach any meaning to.
There is also a heavy sense of sexual repression that lingers throughout the film. Viktoria gazes with lust at naked servants frolicking in the sea before erupting into violence. She watches others engaging in sex with a wistful, pained look on her face. She craves the love that Klára takes for granted and lets that craving poison her, leaving her lingering like a malignant spider, in the darkness of her own desires. Although Viktoria is clearly the villain, it is difficult not to feel sorry for her. She is lonely, isolated, clearly the unloved ugly duckling in her family. Her attempts at seduction are jeered at, her schemes are dashed and she is mocked relentlessly. When faced with the ease with which Klára moves through life, beautiful and beloved, is it any wonder she feels the stab of resentment? Without giving too much away, whilst it could be argued that she gets her comeuppance, as with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, you are left with the sense that the real villain is a society that pits women against each other, and a world that rejects those it deems unworthy.
Morgiana was my first introduction to the work of Juraj Herz but it won’t be the last. This has instantly taken a place on my favourite films of all time list, in a coveted spot alongside Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Haunting. These uneasy bedfellows are excellent character studies of women driven mad by loneliness in a world that despises them. If you like weird, stimulating, terrible and beautiful dreamscapes of malice, give this a go, then head out on your own journey into the dark with Herz.
Morgiana is out now on Second Run Blu-Ray
