Nihilista Magazine - Offend To Defend Music and Arts News and Reviews
Dracula’s Fiancée (2002)
Although primarily known for his work in the 1970s, director Jean Rollin continues to work in film and Dracula’s Fiancée, made in the early part of the Noughties, remains characteristic of Rollin fare.
The film begins with an ageing professor and his young assistant, Eric, staking out a cemetery where they wait to intercept a beautiful vampire and her (dwarf, circus clown) lover - their purpose is to track down her mysterious ‘Master’, a figure who controls a shadowy network of otherworldly characters. By interacting with Thibault, the vampire’s devoted partner, the professor and assistant are given a series of clues to the whereabouts of the Master: it seems that he is about to wed. His fiancée, Isabelle, is a foundling, being protected by the morally-ambivalent Order of the White Virgins in Paris. In order to save Isabelle and dispatch her vampiric Intended, the professor and Eric must navigate a parallel world of contagious insanity, replete with bloodsucker, she-wolf, ogress and sorcerer.
Just as the nuns of the Order of the White Virgins are infected with madness by the presence of Isabelle, so by extension is the audience. As usual, cogent plot and tight pace are not directorial priorities and the whole film unravels in trademark, dreamlike Rollin fashion. Even the script - usually a device of plot exposition - obfuscates and diverts meaning rather than conveying it, and uses richly symbolic language without providing a key to understanding it. We are, like the professor and Eric, prey to the unfolding of events because we are unable to ‘crack the code’ - we/they cannot adequately intervene without fully belonging to the surreal world of the characters. Far from being discouraging however, this only adds to the soporific sensation of timelessness always evoked by Rollin.
Never conventional, Dracula’s Fiancée works like a series of tableaux, bedecked with nudity, hysterical nuns, fantasy, humour and a few moments of very gory violence. The settings are gorgeous - the beach where Rollin has shot so much of his work makes a return - and it’s great to see the return of the eponymous Brigitte Lahaie. Whilst less linear than older works such as Fascination or The Living Dead Girl, Dracula’s Fiancée is an entertaining and atmospheric film in the same aesthetic vein - grimly defiant in its rejection of the modern, and a worthy latter-day offering from a respected cult director.
Review from Miss K