NADJAFeaturing: In Black and White |
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Review by BRANDON CESMAT
The movies have sucked a few more drops of inspiration from the vampire myth. In Nadja, Screenwriter and director Michael Almereyda transfuses Dracula's story with the most foul bloodlines in contemporary culture: the family. The real monsters of "Nadja" are not the vampires but parents who replicate themselves so they can fill one empty life with another.
Almereyda's film, however, is not empty. The script is juicy with evil laughs and thick with the horror of modern times. Jim DeNault's black and white cinematography would be noteworthy even without the use of the Fisher-Price PXL 2000 for all the vampire attacks. Nadja also contains executive producer David Lynch playing a bewildered morgue attendant, a cameo that belongs in this film like a fang in red meat.
Like the Count himself, great stories never die; the next generation of storytellers just revises -- or should I say "revives"? -- them. Here, Almereyda bequeaths the struggle between Dracula and Dr. Van Helsing (both played by Peter Fonda) to their descendants. After learning of Dracula's death, Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) wants a fresh start. Night life in New York offers a vampire only "fleeting joy." She decides to reconcile with her twin, Edgar (Jared Harris), who has sworn off the red stuff. After all, Nadja says, "family is all that matters." But before patching things up with Edgar, Nadja falls in love with Lucy (Galaxy Craze) who happens to be Dr. Van Helsing's niece in-law.
Nadja's family values prevail. By the time Lucy's husband Jim (Martin Donavan) comes to rescue her, Nadja's interest has turned to her brother's lover and his nurse, Cassandra (Suzy Amis).
No mortal stands a chance against Lowensohn's vampire. As the philosopher/monster, she understands the conflict within herself. In a weak moment she reveals that "young people know just about everything, but they can't defend themselves against what they know." Her logic is more than a victim can resist. Nadja despises her father but knows she must consume humans because, unlike plants, humans take more from the earth than they give.
Only Fonda seems alive in a world comprised of Dracula's bastard offspring and the spiritually comatose who are literally someone else's lunch. He chases around New York on a bicycle and pronounces Van Helsing's most outrageous beliefs with the calm of a news anchor: "Some women understand extremes because once a month their bodies let them know that nature is one continuous disaster." But it doesn't sound as heavy as it reads, such as Van Helsing's description of the Count's death: "He was like Elvis in the end....the magic was gone...he died surrounded by drugs and zombies."
Based on Craze's acting it is difficult to tell when Lucy becomes a zombie and uncertain that she ever recovers. But maybe that's the point. As a contemporary woman who distinguishes her days by the junk food she consumes, Lucy has no real life to lose. At least as a zombie, she stopped feeling disappointed. When she returns from her trance, she wants to have a baby, take her empty life and reproduce it. That's horror.
Nadja marks the first time footage from a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 has been blown up to 35mm. Used exclusively for Nadja's violent scenes, "Pixelvision" breaks the screen into squares and blurs the image similar to the way news shows scramble the faces of anonymous sources. Nadja challenges viewers so intoxicated by graphic violence that they often miss the ideas within a film. Pixelvision's purposely distorted images encourage viewers to consider less the attack than what what the attack means.
Almereyda knows that there is power in the blood and that it doesn't have to be red to move an audience.
