There’s a strange blessing in being cursed, it turns out, in “The Widowed Witch,” an uneven but appealingly eccentric fable from Chinese newcomer Cai Chengjie that changes tone seemingly with the turn of the breeze.
Alternating between deadpan social satire and ambiguity-riddled mysticism, this story of a serial widow who turns the superstitious suspicions of her community to her advantage nevertheless permits a clear feminist message through its tangle of styles, genres and even visual textures — as color creeps in and out of the black-and-white proceedings, seemingly in tune with the heroine’s state of mind.
A well-received winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Cai’s film nonetheless will be more readily embraced by further fest programmers than international distributors — for whom its opaque storytelling and heightened performance style mark it as challenging fare.Though billed as a world premiere in Rotterdam, “The Widowed Witch” is in fact a film on its
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