Whether saturating entire frames or dribbling down a rare contrasting design element, there’s red everywhere you look in “The Blood Countess,” as you might well expect. Little of it, however, is the dark congealed claret of blood as we know it. Ulrike Ottinger prefers to paint in the garishly declarative, candied reds of off-brand ketchup, kickass lipstick and iridescent B-movie gore effects — the good, lurid, fake stuff, all the more appropriately artificial for a delirious vampire movie that piles lore upon mythology upon pizza-dream vision, hurtling its story several planets past the true one of its ostensible protagonist, Countess Elizabeth Báthory.
Báthory’s legacy can afford such liberties. The life of the Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer has by now been parlayed into so many folk tales, vampire myths and films — straight and not-so-straight, though few so brashly and glitteringly queer as this one — that Ottinger’s gleefully irreverent film, for all its daft, singular comedy, still feels like it’s honoring a storytelling tradition of sorts.
A droll, unhurried imagining of what might transpire if the 16th-century countess were to wake up in a 21st-century Vienna sullied with smartphones, vegetarianism and Eurovision, it’s more or less a one-joke enterprise — but when said joke is casting a maximally domineering Isabelle Huppert as a hungry, horny, haute couture-inclined incarnation of Báthory, there’s a devoted audience for whom it will go very far indeed.
For the Huppert faithful, an opportunity to see this reliably imperious and tirelessly prolific performer slay all day — literally, this time — comes up every couple of months, albeit in films with varying degrees of staying power. (It’s starting to feel like a while since she hit top form in anything as substantial as Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 provocation “Elle.”) For cultists of 83-year-old Ottinger, flagrantly avant-garde lesbian iconoclast of the New German Cinema movement, “The Blood Countess” is a rarer treat — and a long-awaited one, having been in development for nearly 20 years. Premiering out of competition at the Berlinale, the lush, ludicrous, often laugh-out-loud result looks likely to be the most widely distributed film of her career, also offering ample enjoyment to camp aficionados unfamiliar with the director’s work.
It certainly gives Huppert one of the great entrances of her career: Stiff-backed and tight-jawed, she’s introduced at the prow of a wide, red velvet-upholstered barge, inching with majestic slowness through a low, murky cave in Vienna’s Seegrotte underground lake. Her leisurely drift toward the camera affords us ample time to peruse the details of her deathly-chic makeup and tightly cinched scarlet ensemble, concealing a billowing, royal-blue silk cape — the first of many eye-poppingly operatic creations by costume designer Jorge Jara Guarda — and a CGI bat familiar, freed into the night with a deadpan blessing. “Fly, my love, fly on your secret journey,” intones Huppert, with a face straighter than ours at this point.
All of which is to say, five or so minutes into “The Blood Countess,” you’ll have a good idea of whether this über-arch combination of star worship, genre parody and costume porn is for you or not. If so, great news: There’s plenty more where that came from, as the film voluptuously drapes its slender narrative over two hours of sight gags, queenly vamping and round-and-round shaggy-dog chasing. (Would it be equally funny at a tight 90 minutes? Yes, but excess is the Báthory way.)
Not that the countess has surfaced from her long slumber just to serve looks. As explained in a vague preamble, she has learned of the continued existence of an ancient and magical vampire-hunter’s book — located somewhere in Austria’s seemingly infinite library of libraries — that has the power to destroy her and all her blood-sucking kind, should it fall into the wrong hands. Reunited with her longtime handmaid Hermine (“Everyone Else” star Birgit Minichmayr, raccoon-eyed and aggressively bobbed), she embarks on a circuitous quest to find the tome.
There are diversions along the way to feed on Vienna’s comely young womenfolk, and to fondly call on her young nephew and family black sheep Bubi (Thomas Schubert, “Afire”), a foppishly green-clad vegetarian vampire who’d love nothing more than to become mortal again. That’s about the extent of the plotting, give or take a dunderheaded pair of vampire hunters in tepid pursuit, some equally ineffective but splendidly attired police detectives, Lars Eidinger as Bubi’s stubbornly skeptical psychiatrist, and a recurring niche cameo that will send the most specific members of the film’s target viewership into paroxysms of delight.
You wouldn’t guess that Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek — the author behind one of Huppert’s most essential screen roles in “The Piano Teacher” — is Ottinger’s co-writer here, but that feels part of the joke: the quips are goofy, the story slack, the whole lark a cheerful undermining of a solemnly sensual chapter in European history and literature.
There’s nothing major about “The Blood Countess,” but it’s a film of so many minor pleasures that it adds up anyway: Martin Gschlacht’s richly color-flooded lensing; grisly production design details including maximalist taxidermy and a decapitating cuckoo clock; a lugubrious Austrian-cabaret performance of the Andrews’ Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola”; or just the particular flourish with which Huppert’s Báthory dons her sunglasses after felling a nubile young thing in a public bathroom. Other films have studied the countess with more rigor, more intelligence or more Grand Guignol horror. Few have let her be this purely fabulous.
English (US) ·