"From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star well, it's the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Bathory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth."
"The blood countess has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part."
"She gives us the classic Huppert opaque gaze part dreamy, part coldly assessing and the politely bemused half-smile of concealed distaste, merging into a pout, at the absurdity or ill manners of someone to whom she cannot avoid being introduced. Unlike the other mere mortals in this film, Huppert's face is lit like that of a Golden Age Hollywood star, giving her impeccable maquillage a ghostly sheen of profane sainthood."
Ulrike Ottinger stages a moonlit, camp-inflected Euro-goth tale of Countess Elizabeth Bathory returning to present-day Vienna as a vampire. Isabelle Huppert portrays the countess with aristocratic hauteur, opaque, cool disdain, and an eerie Hollywood-lit presence. The countess glides through Vienna's sewers and revisits relatives, accompanied by her vampire maid Hermine. She encounters her timid milquetoast nephew Rudi, attended by therapist Theobald. Rudi believes a melancholic painting may contain a poetic text capable of curing a vampire's immortality. The film mixes gothic legend, visual glamour, and deadpan performance to reframe the Bathory myth in modern urban settings.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]