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From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role.
Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the classic Huppert opaque gaze – part dreamy, part coldly assessing – and the politely bemused half-smile of concealed distaste, merging into a pout, at the absurdity or ill manners of someone to whom she cannot avoid being introduced. Unlike the other mere mortals in this film, Huppert’s face is lit like that of a Golden Age Hollywood star, giving her impeccable maquillage a ghostly sheen of profane sainthood.
Her Countess Báthory is a vampire who has returned to present-day Vienna, the historic seat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, seen initially gliding through its sewers as if on a royal barge, far more coolly than Harry Lime in The Third Man, though like Lime she is to get her moment on Vienna’s Riesenrad ferris wheel. With her vampire maidservant Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr), she sets out to reacquaint herself with relatives, including her nephew Rudi (Thomas Schubert), a timid milquetoast member of the undead Báthory clan, attended by his therapist Theobald (Lars Eidinger). Rudi is a devotee of the fine arts who sees in a painting what he believes to be evidence of a much-rumoured poetic text of such melancholy that a vampire could be cured of immortality by shedding tears over it. Countess Báthory naturally has no interest in that and sets out to slake her thirst; the city is soon convulsed with fear at news of a serial killer on the loose.
The keynote of the film is (inevitably) surreal black humour in a succession of bizarre episodes, often engagingly bizarre, sometimes heavy-handed, although it is notable that the script is partly credited to Austria’s Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek who is not known for humour of any sort. (Audiences may remember her novel The Piano Teacher chillingly filmed by Michael Haneke with Huppert in the very not funny lead role.)
What parts of this were written by Jelinek? I would guess at the grisly scenes in the ladies’ lavatory in which a bürgerliche Viennese woman is intimately approached by the countess with predictable results. And how about that mysterious text and its redemptive tears? Is that going to lead us anywhere? Well, not really; storytelling is not exactly the point. At one moment, the countess makes a triumphal entrance to the music of the Radetzky March, often described as the right-wing Marseillaise. In some ways, this Blood Countess can be read as a satire of the Austrian ruling class and its eternal snobbery and vanity.
I wonder if there is scope for a non-mythic, tongue-out-of-cheek portrayal of Countess Báthory, a film that commits fully to fear or eroticism and in which humour is not always being sneakily deployed as a kind of alibi in case we find it all ridiculous. Or even a Wicked-like revisionism? A study of how the countess’s reputation has been trashed by misogynists and she was actually really nice? Maybe Ariana Grande would be interested.
