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Delphine Seyrig drifts gracefully into the lobby, and the Resnais note is adduced: "It seems that madam has stayed already at this hotel," a memory from the concierge's bellhop days. Harry Kümel takes the Nosferatu lead and sets the vampiric element as the unbalancing of heterosexual union, less as an outside threat than as a beguiling force that heightens the couple's inner tensions. The Flemish settings are painted red and blue, for the traveling newlyweds (John Karlen, Danielle Ouimet) the honeymoon is already fraught by the groom's reluctance to break the news to Mother. (Possibly because "Mother" is actually Fons Rademakers, a perfumed and rouged-up reminder of his gigolo past.) The off-season resort is empty until Seyrig's Countess Bathory arrives in satin gowns with "secretary" (Andrea Rau) in tow, one exquisitely arch and the other exquisitely doleful. The string of drained corpses inflames the husband's fascination with death—the couple's drawing-room dinner with the visitor ("a very strict diet... lots of sleep" comprise her recipe for ageless beauty) climaxes with him writhing in ecstasy to her descriptions of medieval torture. "So revolting, yet so interesting." Kümel understands his Le Fanu antecedents (Dracula's Daughter, Et Mourir de Plaisir) and contemporaries (The Velvet Vampire, The Blood Spattered Bride), making the decadent mood drolly enchanted in the build-up to sanguinary eruptions. The witty villainess has little use for men, she dismisses marriage's "objects of desire" and meets her demise in a baroque reworking of Lana Turner's highway breakdown in The Bad and the Beautiful, just the fate for "an outdated character, nothing more." The ingénue is left to face the new decade with expanded appetites. With Paul Esser, Georges Jamin, and Joris Collet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |