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Guy Maddin’s been pumping out his distinctive brand of idiomatic lunacy
since the mid-’80s. Unlike the fools who run broadcast TV
and music videos, he knows that it takes more than pulling
out black-and-white video and a few carelessly pasted, patently
digital scratches to make a silent movie, which is what he
does, more or less. He is very, very good at his chosen idiom:
undercranking for luminosity and a slightly slower than usual
speed of motion, utilizing various tints, and generally being
damned convincing. Nor is he in it for mere technical kicks:
Behind his antiquated facades and over-the-top actors lies
an endless amount of perverse sexuality which needs the liberation
of the kind of hysteria only silent film can provide fearlessly.
Yet, for all this, Maddin’s work is rarely any fun, and Dracula:
Pages From A Virgin’s Diary proves almost no exception.
The title would seem to be a cue for a sense of self-conscious
humor and irony, yet Maddin seems to be almost daring us to
take things seriously.
The film is an adaptation of a ballet about Dracula, but
Maddin largely doesn’t care about the choreography, cutting
things up at will and filming people from the waist up (at
the film’s premiere, an angry balletomane assailed Maddin,
who replied that he didn’t know anything about ballet and
that, “We probably could have used someone like you on the
set. Well, someone almost like you.”). The choreography largely
comes into play mainly as an extension of the over-the-top
quality of silent-film acting. Maddin’s technique, per usual,
is pretty mind-blowing, strategically deploying the occasional
sound effect, luridly yellow subtitles, and various tints
(blue for night, etc.).
Frilly distractions aside, Maddin’s interested in the vampire
as a metaphor for unbridled female lust as a threat to your
average late 19th-century male. Maddin takes this seriously,
which is good, but elsewhere his straight-faced approach makes
less novel things less fun than they ought to be. A subtitle
like “A brave man’s blood is the best thing for a woman in
trouble” falls into a sort of defiant vacuum, surrounded by
straight-faced men with stakes and lugubrious pacing. And
yet inspired flashes keep subverting everything, suggesting
a much weirder and funnier movie lurking within. A brief respite
from the generally straight-faced approach comes in the re-telling
of perhaps the most familiar part of the story, when Jonathan
Harker visits Dracula’s castle and is assaulted by “FLESHPOTS!”
and other luridly subtitled temptations. Here, the editing
is sped up, and one briefly recalls the fun to be had with
Maddin’s much acclaimed 2000 short Heart Of The World.
Briefly. But Maddin plays it straight when it comes to the
terrors of the night, and while I’m deeply impressed, I’m
also kind of bored. Perhaps the ballet’s relatively staid
surface held back Maddin, who admittedly made the movie for
the money. But whatever it is, despite the film’s adventurous
exploration of fascinating gender issues and gusto embrace
of ’20s technique, it all feels like so much pastiche and
relatively little enthusiasm.
—Vadim Rizov
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
