The Brooklyn Rail

Just as the daylight hours begin their creeping journey from their midsummer zenith back towards the shadows of fall, a selection of Canadian thaumaturgist Guy Maddin’s most oneiric films will haunt the halls of Film Forum. From June 26 to July 2, Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux (1988/2022), Archangel (1990), and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) will play harmony to a new 4K restoration of his striking third feature, Careful (1992), a morbidly ribald Freudian nightmare about a town so imperiled by avalanches that even their most intimate passions must be meted out quietly and without vehemence. True to his personal style, each of these fever dreams is rendered as neo-silent film bricolage, replete with beautifully expressionistic lensing, heightened theatrical acting, and purple plotting that feels pulled directly from the superstitious sinews of the medulla oblongata.

The restoration of Careful is wonderfully done, bringing out the at-once hyper-artificial and softly organic textures of his mise en scène, from plastic roses to moose antlers to mysterious aqua potions in glistening beakers. In this new quality—for many, Maddin’s work often falls under the low-res purview of DailyMotion clips or soldiers through interruptions by AI ads on Tubi—his candlelit dinner scenes take on the well-deserved, gauzy glow of his singular lighting designs that range from overtly roughshod to classically stately, while his fecund, monochrome color palettes practically seep into one’s corneas in shades of acid green, turmeric yellow, and opiate purple. This cinematic conjuration has been a rarity in theaters and is well worth inviting into one’s subconscious.

Beyond Careful, Maddin’s musical fantasia, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, is a particular treat on the big screen. Originally shot for CBC in collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, this deliberately grungy, low-fi blend of 16 mm, Super 8, and video is an adaptation of Mark Godden’s own 1998 dance adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s also an atmospheric and notably feminist take on this classic story—the somber writhings of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu can’t hold a pewter candelabra to the nocturnal emissions of Maddin’s frustrated dancing virgins.

While the director originally accepted this for-hire project “strictly from hunger,” his dispassion for the subject would in the end prove a generative tool, divorcing his film from the countless interpretations that precede it. Familiar beats are twirled through with an elbow shot smartly to the ribs on their way past—in under a minute of screentime, Jonathan Harker’s entire visit to Dracula’s castle is summarily dismissed as hokum in a montage replete with mawkish intertitles (“A manly temptation!” “Infants for supper?” “A Daring Escape!” etc.)—freeing the director up to focus on and deepen the female characters’ stories in new and satisfying ways. Van Helsing (David Moroni), Harker (Johnny Wright) and the gaggle of other “valiant” men are consistently played for laughs, their intercessions on these “victimized” wives’ experiences presented as overbearing, paternalistic, and puritanical. Meanwhile, corps of previously unseen and unwritten watchful women (nuns, maids, mothers in glass coffins, brides) stand in judgement and sashay in solidarity.

Politically, then, Pages takes artistic license to follow in the footsteps of silent feminist polemics like Häxan—down to the brood of horn-tailed demons twerking on Victorian bedposts. Most of the runtime is devoted to the vampiric seduction of Lucy Westernra (an effervescent and ferocious Tara Birtwhistle), whose libidinal repression drives her eagerly into the arms of the Prince of the Night. In the face of all this corseting, Maddin’s conclusion is a resounding, “No wonder!” The real intervention, of course, isn’t per se these themes (themselves already well-plumbed in films like Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula) so much as the boldness and independence he imbues in these reimagined characters. Here, when Mina Harker (CindyMarie Small) reads her husband’s account of his louche night with Dracula’s brides, rather than cry, she goes for his package. The film’s treatment of Dracula himself, here played sympathetically by Chinese-Canadian dancer Zhang Wei-Qiang, is similarly thoughtful, bringing out the novel’s pervasive miscegenation anxieties, which are more frequently used as “Oriental” window dressing on screen. As Stephen Holden put it in the New York Times, “this Dracula may be dangerous, [but] he is also a martyr in an antisexual, xenophobic witch hunt.” Viewers will likely find themselves rooting for him and his newest lovers in equal measure.

“Listen to them, the children of the night,” the Count famously tells a horrified Harker in Stoker’s novel, “What music they make!” With Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, Maddin plays that music loud, dancing with us in fervent, broken time, tossing us into the “sea of wonders” in which these mere mad mortals find themselves inexorably, deliriously plunged.