_Nadja_

			reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs

  
     It's a murky, used up world where postmodern vampires hang out. The
lusty sexuality that previous generations of ghouls could take for granted
is pretty much depleted, the streets are grey and empty, and it's hard to
make distinctions between night and day, or interiors and exteriors. In
Michael Almereyda's _Nadja_, this forever after-hours milieu is
rendered in luxurious shades-of-greyish surfaces intercut with harsh-lit
grainy Fisher-Price pixelvision images. Eventually, as the film charts a
journey from the vague dreadfulness of Manhattan at 3 AM to the
stone-castle emptiness of Transylvania, you feel like you've been
somewhere, seen something, but exactly where and what is less than clear. 

     Which isn't to say that the journey itself isn't stunning and
sometimes jangly. Romanian actor Elina Lowensohn is the film's title
character, a morose, perfectly jaded vampire who's currently bored with
her undead life: it appears that after 400 years, sucking all those
victims dry has become tedious. As the film opens, she's given an
opportunity to start over, to be "born again,'' when her father, Count
Dracula, is killed by intrepid vampire-tracker Dr. Van Helsing (Peter
Fonda has some fun with playing both the fervent tracker and the undead
count). 

     Invoking the absurd spookiness of oldstyle vampire movies,
_Nadja_ walks - deliberately, slowly, and often quite humorously -
through Bram Stoker s familiar plot, reimagining its blood-relationships
to approximate contemporary fears of commitment, intimacy, and body
fluids. In search of a new self, Nadja finds love when she meets Lucy
(Galaxy Craze), a copy-shop employee who's having a quietl hard time with
her husband Jim (Martin Donovan). Vulnerable and visibly weary Lucy is
intrigued by Nadja's seductive lament ("Pain frees you...'' meaningful
pause... "I feel the pain of fleeting joy...'' meaningful glance) and
invites Nadja home one night while Jim is out with his uncle, out on bail.
(Since the movie is concerned with familial connections and betrayals,
this uncle happens to be Van Helsing, and as it turns out, he's not really
his uncle, he's his father, and a long lost half-sister shows up as well.)

     The women's evening together is gorgeous, both in its gentle romance
(once they discover a shared affection for tarantulas - Lucy has one named
Bela - their liaison is inevitable) and visual elegance (pixelvision blown
up to 35mm becomes almost cubic, mysteriously mechanical, blurring the
edges of hungry mouths, bloody fingers, and smooth white bellies against
high-contrast lighting; if it refrains from the visceral immediacy of
Sarandon and Deneuve, the scene's severe beauty is quit moving). Nadja
drifts back to her own apartment, desperately thirsty, weakened by the
encounter; she tells her devoted slave Renfield (Karl Geary), "I feel
terrible. I haven't been interested in a woman in such a long time.''
 
    Nadja's "interest'' in Lucy, however, is soon relegated to a
side-issue, as Jim and Lucy seem more or less destined to reconcile (at
least according to Stoker) and Nadja's more focused on reconciling with
her estranged twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris, son of Richard). That he's
being nursed by the protective, ultraswee Cassandra (Suzi Amis) disrupts
his sister's hopes for a reunion, as does the propitious appearance of Van
Helsing (with wooden stake), who's figured out why the zombified Lucy has
been bleeding rather profusely from her nose and vagina. From here the
narrative goes where you think it will, almost: everyone follows Nadja
back to the old country for a showdown where the dyke-vamp gets hers
(there is a very welcome final twist), but this hardly seems the point. 

     The most compelling point here has to do with Lowensohn (seen
recently in Hal Hartley's _Amateur_): she's sulky and sad, but her 
precision is also remarkably vibrant against her shades-of-grey backdrop. 
A luxuriously campy villain, her Nadja is obviously consumed by her 
super-dysfunctional family, but she's cool too, more sensual than 
ethereal, postmodern but dead-on eerie. 
  
  
Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer
studies project at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.