***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Wei-Qiang Zhang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni, Cindy Marie Small, Johnny A. Wright, and Brent Neale
Directed by Guy Maddin, from the ballet by Mark Godden and the novel by Bram Stoker
2002
NR (should be PG13) 73 min
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2002
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies, here comes filmmaker Guy Maddin’s “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” which proves that even Francis Coppola’s “Dracula” adaptation is a far cry from cornering the market on vampire weirdness. How crazy is it? It’s silent, it’s in black-and-white, it’s on 8 and 16mm prints instead of the normal 32, and Dracula’s Asian. Oh yeah, and it’s a ballet. It’s also a terrific dirty joke.
Yes, lest you make the mistake of thinking that just because something is in black-and-white that it’s safe for the whole family, just look at the three guys giving a blood transfusion to the helpless woman who has fallen prey to the undead. Watch them bend over her, in a group, huffing and puffing, squeezing and clenching their arms. The whole movie is pretty much like this, bringing all the sexual tension and repression that characterized Bram Stoker’s original novel not quite to the surface, but awfully, hilariously close.
The movie stars Canada’s own Royal Winnipeg Ballet in choreographer Mark Godden’s adaptation of Stoker. We witness the four major setpieces of the story, including the promiscuous Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) being seduced and destroyed by Dracula, the naïve Jonathan Harker (Johnny Wright) stumbling upon his castle, his chaste fiance Mina (Cindy Marie Small) falling for the Count, and the final confrontation between the undead and the vampire hunter Van Helsing (David Moroni, looking a whole lot like a dirty old man). Godden and Maddin play fast and loose with the details and plot of Stoker’s novel, instead focusing on the key symbols and subtexts of the Dracula legend, such as crosses, virginity, the rivalry among Lucy’s suitors, and the idea of the dirty foreigner setting the women free sexually. Dracula himself is played with an awesome presence by dancer Wei-Qiang Zhang, and along the way there are various stand-ins for phalli, not just the blood pumps, but spears, knives, and hypodermic needles.
The ballet is set to excerpts from the first two symphonies by Gustav Mahler, which fits the action, even though he’s not my favorite composer (actually, I think he sounds like he took those nothing tunes that Marge Simpson hums and orchestrated them). Maddin’s wickedly frantic editing style is both an homage to the style of silent films and something of a parody of recent Jerry Bruckheimer movies. It is wonderfully heavy-handed in the way of many silents, zooming in on everything important and delivering a wildly unnecessary and lurid montage of it in various poses. The only downside is that it cut down on the amount of dancing we get to see, and what dancing we do see is usually in short snippets, unable to work up a larger rhythm. The Joffrey Ballet version of “The Nutcracker” that usually comes on television around Christmas is a more accessible opportunity to watch ballet. Maddin himself refers to his editing as “dance butchery” and remarked that “the dancers thrived on the close-ups, which they never get when they’re onstage.” And what close-ups they are, with obvious emotions, gnashing teeth, and loaded glances from heavily eye-lined eyes.
To tell this story, Maddin has lovingly re-created (and gently mocked) all the filmmaking conventions of the 1920s. Everyone onscreen is an overacted caricature, every set seems stolen from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” every edit is jarringly out of vogue, title cards convey reams of spoken dialogue in one sentence, and every frame looks in need of a digital restoration. Yet this is all Maddin’s intent: the washed-out look of the film is strangely glowing and hypnotic, the sets look great in their phony way, and the characters are so archetypical that melodramatic overacting suits them just fine. No film is a perfect window into reality and all make use of some form of stylization and conventionality. Silent films simply use an even more heightened style and, frankly, I’m kind of bored with the mainstream language of film, which is why I found the delicious artifice of “Kill Bill” and “Russian Ark” so appealing.
But Maddin goes one step beyond, not giving us a movie from 1923, but delivering a movie from a parallel universe’s 2002, where color, sound, digital video, and subtly just never made it into cinema. Maddin adds a handful of modern flourishes, including occasional splashes of bright primary colors and random sound effects. More noticeable are the often sarcastic, self-deprecatory title cards used in place of dialogue, which read more like something the Coen brothers might write than Buster Keaton or Sergei Eisenstien.
So if you’re in the mood for something pretty far out there, but still fun and fast-paced, or if you just want to seem esoteric and snooty in front of your friends, “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary” is the way to go. And if you’re wondering how anyone could come up with this strange vision, just remember: they’re all Canadian.
Finished November 2nd, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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