![]() By contrast, Maddin embraces Stoker’s panic and returns Lucy and her friend Mina to center stage, making them - rather than the vampire and his hunters - the focus. Coppola managed to insert some kink into his version, yet for all his film’s erotic suggestiveness he never fully laid bare the novel’s undertone of sexual panic. You don’t need to throw Stoker’s imagination on the couch to get the symbolism of the novel’s blood-engorged beasts and heaving female bosoms, but post-Lugosi most Dracula movies have tended to bypass the women altogether in favor of testosterone-and-gore fueled action. Whether the count assumes the vigorous shape of Christopher Lee or a feral Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, the bloodsucker makes for a choice screen villain - a continental smoothie putting moves on virgins and looking for trouble. A sexed-up Dracula was likely a function of box-office pragmatism, but it’s also what makes his story a movie perennial. In the years since Lugosi twirled his cape, filmmakers have rarely deviated from Tod Browning’s vision of the count as a matinee idol, a kind of weird uncle to Valentino. Although the vampire enters the story as a bald old man with a long white mustache, that vision has long been subsumed by the flamboyant figure cut by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s. Stoker’s original “Dracula” creakily unfolds as a series of diary entries and letters. ![]() But while Stoker’s Lucy grows progressively weaker after she’s bitten, Maddin’s all but glows. As in the novel, Lucy falls under the vampire’s spell, succumbing to Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) under the cloak of night when women of a certain age and class are meant to be as cut off from the world as her mother. Among the characters are Lucy Westernra (Tara Birtwhistle), a coquette who relishes the attentions of her three suitors and lives alone with her ailing mother, a prisoner of an iron lung. A maverick with a passion and talent for archaic cinematic vernacular, Maddin introduces his principal players in the manner of early movies. Set in 1897 on the “East Coast of England,” the film opens with the sounds of gulls and lighthouse bells capped with a flourish of Mahler. It’s sexy, brainy and slightly nuts, and if it weren’t playing at the Nuart Theatre it would be right at home at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. A wittily revisionist adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic and a passionate kiss to a lost cinematic past, the film was directed by Guy Maddin, performed by members of the Winnipeg Royal Ballet and looks like a lost silent-movie masterpiece - albeit one that would never have been shot. Straight out of Canada by way of Transylvania, “Dracula - Pages From a Virgin’s Diary” ranks among the more eccentric wonders of the new-movie world.
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