Guy Maddin – Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002)

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By turns voluptuous, whimsical and exceedingly strange, Guy Maddin’s film “Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary” suggests that silent movies and ballet may have always been natural dancing partners. At least they seem that way when folded into each other by a quirky visionary like Mr. Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker whose work has acquired a fervent cult following.

His silent, black-and-white “Dracula,” which opens today at Film Forum, was made for CBC television and is a collaboration between Mr. Maddin and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which unveiled its evening-length adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel on the stage five years ago. For all its oddities, the movie is surprisingly faithful to the 1897 novel, which infused a modern ashen-faced archetype of night-crawling depravity into popular culture around the same time Freud published his groundbreaking studies of hysteria.

Mr. Maddin, whose mostly silent films recreate the flickering, melodramatic ambience of early movies, is a cinematic aesthete whose montages evoke a primitive moviegoing experience with a winking postmodern knowingness. In “Dracula” he and his longtime associate director and editor, deco dawson, have re-invented the dance film in a homemade style that alludes to F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” while looking back but nodding to the present.

“Dracula” isn’t altogether silent or entirely black and white. Sound effects and painted-on dashes of color have been applied. Blood (which is plentiful) is red and money green, and the story’s jagged mood swings are accented by the film’s tint, which changes from sepia to blue to orange to lavender.

Subtitles and intertitles are sparingly but tellingly used to keep the story on track and to announce its themes. The use of dreamy close-ups, slow motion, pantomime and silhouette, and copious amounts of fog that makes the dancers appear to be rising up from a roiling gorge enhance the movie’s sometimes campy Gothic ambience.

For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, “Dracula” is a compelling expressionistic work. Its dancer-actors, especially Zhang Wei-Qiang’s Dracula, Tara Birtwhistle’s Lucy, CindyMarie Small’s Nina, and the Dr. Van Helsing of David Moroni, C. M., emote in the grand nostril-flaring tradition of silent melodrama. Their leering grimaces of the unhinged, fantasy-besotted characters are as memorable as Mark Godden’s elegantly sexy choreography.

The director has accentuated the ballet’s racial and erotic subtexts with a fun house audacity. At the beginning of the film, the image of blood seeping from East to West across a crudely drawn map of Europe sets up the portrayal of Count Dracula as a mysterious Eastern Other spreading contamination into the West. As Mr. Zhang’s suave, swashbuckling count seduces and poisons his victims, you think of Attila the Hun as a Valentino-like voluptuary luring them to surrender to the intoxicating rhythm of the tango in his hard, unsmiling eyes. Radiating an avid sexual intensity that carries a whiff of sadism, Mr. Zhang is as charismatic a Dracula as has ever been shown on the screen.

Once the count infects Lucy (the movie’s titles make such a fetish of the transfusion of fluids from men into women that the contamination is portrayed as racial, sexual and medical all at once), she succumbs to a lingering malaise that suggests a fatal case of tuberculosis. As in other recent interpretations of “Dracula,” the image of contaminated blood also has overtones of AIDS. But more than a plague metaphor, this “Dracula” implies a demonic sexual hysteria imported into repressed Victorian England from outside.

Although a transfusion of clean blood briefly restores Lucy’s vigor, the count immediately returns and re-infects her. Once she has died and been resurrected as one of the undead, she is a grinning maniac writhing in spasms of blood lust: liberated but cursed. Van Helsing, the pious vampire hunter who leads the charge against Dracula, is a fiery-eyed Puritan whose excessive zeal reeks of prurience. Lucy’s suitors who join his posse, are pious, cross-bearing goody-goods, wielding flashlights, bent on a holy crusade resembling a late-19th-century lynch mob.

The story is divided into two parts. In the first, Dracula seduces Lucy, in the second he pursues her best friend, Nina, and is ultimately tracked down and ends up impaled on a stake. His final pose is sensual and heroic. This Dracula may be dangerous, he is also a martyr in an antisexual, xenophobic witch hunt. – Stephen Holden, NY Times, May 14, 2003