Commissioned by producer Vonnie Von Helmolt to adapt Mark Godden’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary for CBC’s Opening Night, Guy Madden creates an expressionistic curio every bit as playful, if not as as consistently engaging, as his mini-masterpiece Heart of the World. Madden successfully downplays the element of dance in this black-and-white neo-silent film to fabulous effect. Though movement is barely discernible beneath the endless fog and digital effects, it feels that much more special (almost cathartic) when characters do break into synchronized dance.
A standout image is that of Lucy’s saviors twirling inside Dracula’s abode, the light from their lanterns twinkling in the night. Madden seemingly refuses to broach the allegory of AIDS that’s become so inextricably bound to modern vampire tales and adaptations of Dracula and does something entirely more relevant. Zhang Wei-Qiang stars as Dracula, referred explicitly in the opening scenes of the film as an Other that invades from the East (for added effect, his blood literally crawls across a map of the world from Asia to Europe).
Madden’s many fixations are exaggerated and fetishized to delirious proportions. The virginal women in the film are fiercely independent and hungry for sex, while Jonathan Harker (a closet-case perhaps?) rejects his girlfriend Mina’s advances, thus ushering in Dracula’s amour fou. Madden elaborately likens the spilling of blood to ejaculation throughout, and fascinating penetrations abound. Dracula shoves money (tinted green) in the faces of the men who will kill him. And when Dr. Van Helsing cuts Dracula’s arm, it’s gold coins and not blood that the vampire releases. A master conservationist and expert image-maker, Madden reimagines Bram Stoker’s classic text as a feverish vision of Christian angst and cultural invasion.
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