Artsy `Nadja' brings no fresh blood to vampire genre
This black-and-white movie's far- out premise, revealed through flashbacks, is that Count Dracula himself had stalked a Transylvanian peasant girl to satisfy his lust (besides the usual bloodlust, of course). Together they conceived twins, Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) and Edgar. The peasant girl dies, and Dracula turns out to be -- who would have guessed it -- a dysfunctional dad who ignores his offspring. So naturally, Nadja and Edgar grow up to be dysfunctional adult vampires who look to be not much older than 30 even though they must be 200 or more years old.
Nadja claims her prey by seducing them, and her seductions know no gender. She entices lonely Lucy (Galaxy Chase) away from a bar and they return to Lucy's apartment and drunkenly cavort beneath a Christmas tree. The tree is decorated with un-Christmas-like odds and ends such as a wailing battery-powered Halloween vampire that disturbs Nadja to no end because it reminds her of her father and dying brother, Edgar.
"Edgar hates me," says Nadja. "Does he live in Carpathia?" queries Lucy. "No, he lives in Brooklyn," deadpans Nadja. Occasional amusing lines like this are inconsistent with the film's timbre and make Nadja just that much more incoherent. For the most part, the movie takes itself very seriously, but it still uses silly lines like, "Face it, Jim -- she's a zombie," when Lucy suffers from Nadja's bites.
Coincidentally enough, most of the characters have the same names as characters in Stoker's novel. There's Lucy, who's married to a man named Jim (Martin Donovan). The wild-haired vampire- seeker/slayer-type is called Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda). Even sillier is the fact that Nadja keeps a handsome, raven-haired (one would think so, but the movie is in black and white) dark-eyed slave and calls him Renfield, which was the name of Stoker's lunatic.
Most of Nadja takes place in a modern major American city. The film lightly brushes the possibilities of vampires on the loose in the '90s, saying that there are "many of these creatures, and they blend right in," or something like that. In one scene, filmed in obscuring Pixelvision, Nadja seduces and drains a victim of blood -- in a car.
Nadja is truly more-artsy-than-artsy. It seems to scream, "I am an art flick!" This film could have easily been directed by Ed Wood because, for all it artsiness, it has all the quality and plot of a schlocky B-movie. Granted, it tries hard to successfully be eerie. Almereyda cashes in on the art-house Pixelvision fad. At first, all the explicit scenes are done in boxy pixellation. Thick, pixellated blood is effectively disgusting. But as the movie goes on, the pixellation appears in random scenes and does nothing to uphold the plot. Sometimes, as if just for fun, Almereyda switches to grainier film.
Besides the extensive, gratuitous use of Pixelvision, the movie uses strange camera angles and lighting. Often, the crown of a character's head seems to be accidentally sheared off. Some scenes should logically have light streaming through a window, but instead it wafts up from below to illuminate the actors' faces.
The makeup probably would have looked good in color, but in black and white it didn't conceal the flaws in the actors' faces. I liked this aspect, actually, because it made the improbable Nadja seem some what human.
If you are in the mood for chilling vampire movies, Peter Fonda's Nadja is just not the way to go, although it is more interesting than Bram Stoker's Dracula , Keanu Reeves or not. A better bet for an interesting juxtaposition of vampires with 20th-century America would be The Lost Boys because it's not nearly as pretentious as Nadja . Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer is more entertaining than Nadja because it's honestly silly.
You'd be better off watching the original movie version of Dracula , circa the late 1920s or early 1930s, or Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire .
But all this nit-picking, whiny criticism doesn't mean that Nadja isn't a worthwhile movie to see. It's not the spine-tingling horror I expected. It's not comedy, either, even though sometimes one has to wonder.
Go see it with a group of friends, and be sure to bring your wooden stakes and silver crosses.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the September 22, 1995 issue.
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