Magnificent Obsessions

This week, all true movie lovers will rush to see a violent and fantastic special-effects thriller, in which a character endowed with uncanny powers rips through the veil of illusion that is normal life. The movie I refer to, of course, is Guy Maddin's new, mostly black-and-white silent film, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, starring Zhang Wei-Qiang. A similar-sounding picture, The Matrix Reloaded, happens to have opened simultaneously, but I will withhold comment on it until next week. I'd rather focus for now on the more daring and visionary film.

Imagine a pale virgin lifting forward in bed, tilting from supine to upright with her head, torso and outstretched arms fixed in entranced unison. This is how poor, flighty Lucy Westernra ought to float toward her demon lover--as if she were already severed from earthly ties. This is how she drifts up somnambulistically in Maddin's Dracula, an effect that's all the more startling for being achieved without wires or camera tricks. Like most of the film's characters, Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) is played by a dancer from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, whose evening-length production of Dracula, choreographed by Mark Godden, is the egg in Maddin's cinematic soufflé. The dancers rise as if weightless, and so does the movie.

Escaping the pull of narrative gravity from the very first shots, this Dracula begins in the middle of the story and within no defined space. The plague ship is already nearing its English harbor; Lucy is already flying beyond her suitors, toward death's embrace; and mad Renfield is already rattling the bars of his cell, crying out to his master, "I hear you coming!" Of course, since this is a silent film, he's wrong--he hears only the soundtrack music, by Gustav Mahler. But Renfield's delirium is general in the film, which cuts agitatedly among disparate views and unexplained events, glimpsed in the flashes given off from an unseen lighthouse. The focus is gauzy, the contrast between light and dark exaggerated, the field of vision often contracted by an iris to give the effect of a dream picture; and it's a dream with the obsessiveness of fever, which sends jitters through the rhythm and calls up images again and again.

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