Roger Vadim's moony decadence, for all its "modernity" (Godard's word), has just as often aimed for hothouse panting right out of a 19th-century chambermaid's mind -- thus, from Laclos to Sheridan Le Fanu, though this jet-setting version of Carmilla is a less successful update than his jazz-soaked Liaisons Dangereuses the year before. Indeed, where for the randy undead of The Vampire Lovers or The Velvet Vampire bloodsucking segued into transgressive orgasms, the picture's tasteful lechery scarcely mines the sexual intimations of vampirism -- the original title notwithstanding, the heroine dies less of pleasure than of frustration, of desire continually thwarted. As the Euro-bash glides outside through the luxurious Italian manor, young Carmilla (creamy Danish Annette Stroyberg) petulantly dances on her bed, longing in secret for Count Mel Ferrer, her cousin. On comes the white gown owned by a vampiress a few centuries back, and the cemetery fireworks that rouse her spirit out of her grave and into the young lass' body; Carmilla takes to wandering the lush grounds and eyeing the bottle-necked beauties, particularly Elsa Martinelli, Ferrer's fiancée -- all filmed, immaculately as always, by Claude Renoir. Less oneiric than just somnolent, the risible reveries eventually work themselves into a baby-Cocteau jumble, the fiancée's slumber leading to surgeon gloves tinted blood-red amid much b & w vogeuing, a window opening into liquid, the camera circling two babes as they go for the jugular. "Still a modernist?" purrs the unseen narrator, and truly it takes a cynic to resist Vadim's softcore-widescreen invocation of his wife smooching Martinelli for a drop of blood on her lip, the result, of course, of a finger pricked on a rose. With Réne-Jean Chauffard, and Marc Allégret.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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