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Film Description
Faithful to Stoker's novel this blends dance from the Royal Winnepeg Ballet with typically delirious Maddin screen effects to produce the most original Dracula adaptation you will see. A completely original hybrid with the flashes of colour and sound effects particularly effective.
It’s good to see Guy Maddin get a UK film release and remain as unclassifiable as ever. One trade magazine recently described Dracula – Pages from A Virgin’s Diary as ... more >
It’s good to see Guy Maddin get a UK film release and remain as unclassifiable as ever. One trade magazine recently described Dracula – Pages from A Virgin’s Diary as ‘Ballet / Horror’. It truly is an inventive experimental hybrid with the Winnipeg Ballet Company dancing their way through the intertwined stories that make up Stoker’s tale while Maddin’s eye for melodrama and his characteristic sense of humour are never far away. Present too are his borrowings from conventions of silent cinema, with such devices as intertitles and use of an iris lens.
Fear of invasion underscores this version of the tale with Lucy’s dream making this explicit early on in the film: “Immigrants! Others! From Other Lands!” scream the intertitles as dark arrows snake across from central Europe, though little more is made of this except for the main point of the Count being played by the Chinese dancer Zhang Wei-Quiang. The devil gets the best tunes and here the Count gets the best dances in which he is so captivating that the caricatures of manhood that are Lucy’s suitors cannot begin to compete in allure. The use of dancers lends grace to the action but also effectively brings brings out the inherent eroticism and undercurrents of sexuality in the story.
There’s use of sound effects - creaks and footfalls, a spade through gristle, are a minimal and effective, as are the flashes of colour in this tinted film, with red for blood, green for money and just once, blue glowing on a crucifix.
If it doesn’t quite come off it may be because Maddin was constrained in his normal visual invention by the very thing that makes the film unique - the use of dance, and his devices of smears and distorting mirrors, flashes and searchlights seem somehow divorced from the staged action instead of being an essential constituent. Yet if Maddin had made a stylised silent film of the story he would have risked charges of parody and also comparison – with Murnau’s Nosferatu obviously, and maybe he needed the ballet to make the film thoroughly his own territory.
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Guy Maddin’s ballet Bram Stoker makes for a dreamy Dracula, sparked by a nightmare revealing the aristocratic good guys to be fearful not only of the female sexuality ... more >
Guy Maddin’s ballet Bram Stoker makes for a dreamy Dracula, sparked by a nightmare revealing the aristocratic good guys to be fearful not only of the female sexuality described by the book (with its attendant notions of impurity), but by the arrival of immigrants coming from the East to take their women and leech off the State. A new slant, then, for a version of a Transylvanian vampire story in which the vampire is played by a Chinese actor and where Lucy’s shouts of 'Unclean! Unclean!' take on a whole new dimension.
As with all Maddin films, this latest is an acquired taste, accentuated by the fact the principals keep breaking into pirouettes every two minutes. The director’s fondness for black-and-white silent film imagery occasionally gets in the way of the Winnipeg Ballet’s staging – some of the beauty is lost in the dark corners of the screen – but, like the original text, a real sense of momentum is built up and the work becomes greatly more confident the longer it goes on, to the point where you wonder whether Maddin is about to decapitate a classic novel by letting the monster win. The approach elicits small moments of wonder – Dracula’s first dance with the undead Lucy, set against the flurries of a snowstorm, is genuinely lush – in a film at once more poetic, more romantic, and more intentionally amusing than Coppola’s screen Dracula of ten years ago. < less
