dir. Guy Maddin
Fri-Thurs May 23-29 (no shows Mon).
What's a small theater to do during the audience-sapping onslaught that is SIFF? If you're the Little Theatre, you book a film that should have played the festival to begin with, a film that has gotten tons of buzz on the festival circuit, a film that's so good it's a must-see for any film lover. If you're the Little Theatre, you book Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary.
Over his career, Canadian Guy Maddin has created a style all his own. Working in a studio that isn't soundproofed, he shoots his movies silent and then adds the dialogue and sound effects later, similar to what the Italian neorealists did after WWII. Maddin looks to the past, to that uneasy time when the studios were incorporating sound but still using the intertitles of the dying silent era. Careful (1992), his tale of repression in a mountain village prone to avalanches, is probably my favorite of his earlier films, though everything from Tales from the Gimli Hospital to Archangel to Twilight of the Ice Nymphs has something great in it.
The reason Maddin's movies work so well is that they're funny--not just funny ha-ha, but also weird and surprising and surreal and smart. Dracula is no exception. Commissioned to take Mark Godden's dance piece for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and film it for television, Maddin has made it his own. Using the original ballet as a jumping-off point, he created a full-on silent feature, complete with expressionistic close-ups and tinted black-and-white footage (the blood practically glows red). The result is a great story in which the occasional dance segment has the same emotional resonance that songs do in the best movie musicals. Characters dance because their emotions are so heightened that they just can't help it.
Despite its period setting and period style, Maddin's Dracula is timeless in that it taps into themes that are as current now as they were then: xenophobia, racism, and sexual hypocrisy. Early on, intertitles warn of IMMIGRANTS! From the east! From the sea! Needless to say, these dark-skinned outsiders are seen as vampires, highly sexual creatures who live to steal "our" women. Sound familiar? It's the same argument that's been used for centuries to defend racism--they're less than human and they have dangerous, animalistic urges--made into metaphor.
Sticking fairly close to Bram Stoker's novel, the first half of the story opens with Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) bristling under the need to choose just one lover out of three, and then succumbing to the seductions of Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang). Of course, it's up to the men to save her from herself once she's infected by the vampire's wiles. Then there's a mini-flashback to Jonathan Harker's trip to buy Dracula's castle, where Harker (Johnny Wright) succumbs to an orgy of succubi, which then leads right into the battle for the soul of his fiancée Mina (CindyMarie Small). Through it all, Van Helsing (David Moroni) lords over the story with his crusade to uphold the morality of Victorian England.
Maddin presents women who are sexually liberated and punished because of it. Lucy's implied fooling around with three men is tolerated because they're white and wealthy. When she starts sleeping with the immigrant--er, vampire--then all bets are off. "She's filled herself with polluted blood," Van Helsing says upon examining her, but even after attempts to save her by pumping her full of blood from the three men, she falls back into the arms of the vampire. With this socially unacceptable behavior, Lucy becomes dead to society, and yet she still walks around. Knowing that they failed to save her, they must destroy her. When the titular virgin Mina later becomes sexually curious, she nearly falls into the same trap, but her religious background (she lives in a convent) helps her make the "right" choice, at least as far as society is concerned.
As in Stoker's novel, the repression wins in the end, but not before cracks appear in the façade that allow the sunlight of individual freedom, and the possibility of equality, to stream in. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary may very well be the best thing you see during the film festival, even if it's not officially a part of it. In honor of its quality, the Little Theatre is even extending its run past the theater's normal four days. Really, you have no excuse to miss it.
