I've been viewing a bunch of Dracula-related movies since reading Bram Stoker's novel, and I'm not disinclined towards highly-stylized and artistic adaptations. My favorite Dracula film, after all, is a postmodern silent-film ballet, "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" (2002). Not exactly mainstream fodder. But, "Nadja" is merely artsy; it throws the entire book of arthouse gimmicks onto the screen and pretends to art.
It's filmed in black and white, with many scenes photographed with a toy camcorder, there's lots of cigarette smoking, there are scenes where indie music blares in some attempt to cover with emotionality images of nothing happening, there are other strange sound effects, voiceover narration, hardly-motivated canted and obscured angles, slow motion, jump cuts, negative images and deadpan delivery regarding daddy issues, narcissistic self wallowing and sophomoric philosophizing. At worst, this is very annoying and hard to watch, with the best parts--all of the violent vampire vestiges--obscured by the lousy pixelated images of the toy camcorder and the scenes that are in crisp black-and-white come off as some young Goth woman incessantly smoking, hanging out at bars and ranting about herself.
At best, the ironic distance comes off as some kind of joke--like an intentionally so-bad-it's-good movie. I was laughing at delivery of such lines as, "She's dying... for a cigarette," or "Her emotions are like big storms," and I strongly suspected we had been taken for a ride when the Lucy character, in a zombie state, starts listing what she ate, including her discrimination of M&M'S colors, with the scene photographed in an absurdly arty fashion, still in black-and-white, and with over-dramatic blocking. Plus, this is the kind of humor one would expect from David Lynch, who produced and has a cameo in this one. In this light, Peter Fonda as Van Helsing seems to be the only one letting the joke slip. In the narrative, he's supposedly the crazy one, but his character is the only one that isn't almost-entirely a nuisance. It helps that, unlike the other characters, except for, sort of, Nadja in the end, his character has some motivation to action instead of just sitting around like everyone else saying stupid stuff, waiting for the next blurry, pixelated action to barely be seen.
Past the artsy ostentation and inane dialogue, the story is a simple updated melding of bit parts of Stoker's book with a retelling of Universal's sequel "Dracula's Daughter" (1936). Nadja's hood is a reference to the one Gloria Holden wore in the predecessor. The parts from the novel mostly consist of character names and traits: Dracula dies, but Van Helsing is still nutty, Lucy falls under the vampire curse again and must be saved, and Renfield is always a slave. Basically, "Nadja" follows the plot of "Dracula's Daughter." She feeds off men and women (the sex being more explicit in this '94 film compared to the '36 one, expectantly), burns her dead father, renounces him and tries to forge a new path, some men try to stop her, she goes back home--completing the circle of where Stoker's Dracula began. Some of the particulars are different this time, including the inclusion of characters from Stoker's book and the addition of a twin brother. The brother is a rather unnecessary character except that it adds to a doubles theme that the movie develops late and becomes potentially incestuous in the end. And Lucy's conversion plays out as a bad episode of the menses. This isn't art. Art is beautiful and intelligent; artsy is pretentious.
(Mirror Note: Van Helsing and son look at some photographs that Lucy, apparently, took of her night with Nadja. Contrary to some other vampire films, this vampire's image can be captured on camera, but, as the pictures are said to reveal, her image isn't reflected in a mirror. There's the horror-film jump-scare cliché when Lucy hallucinates Nadja's image in a mirror. And Van Helsing uses the reflections off his sunglasses several times to confirm vampirism.)
It's filmed in black and white, with many scenes photographed with a toy camcorder, there's lots of cigarette smoking, there are scenes where indie music blares in some attempt to cover with emotionality images of nothing happening, there are other strange sound effects, voiceover narration, hardly-motivated canted and obscured angles, slow motion, jump cuts, negative images and deadpan delivery regarding daddy issues, narcissistic self wallowing and sophomoric philosophizing. At worst, this is very annoying and hard to watch, with the best parts--all of the violent vampire vestiges--obscured by the lousy pixelated images of the toy camcorder and the scenes that are in crisp black-and-white come off as some young Goth woman incessantly smoking, hanging out at bars and ranting about herself.
At best, the ironic distance comes off as some kind of joke--like an intentionally so-bad-it's-good movie. I was laughing at delivery of such lines as, "She's dying... for a cigarette," or "Her emotions are like big storms," and I strongly suspected we had been taken for a ride when the Lucy character, in a zombie state, starts listing what she ate, including her discrimination of M&M'S colors, with the scene photographed in an absurdly arty fashion, still in black-and-white, and with over-dramatic blocking. Plus, this is the kind of humor one would expect from David Lynch, who produced and has a cameo in this one. In this light, Peter Fonda as Van Helsing seems to be the only one letting the joke slip. In the narrative, he's supposedly the crazy one, but his character is the only one that isn't almost-entirely a nuisance. It helps that, unlike the other characters, except for, sort of, Nadja in the end, his character has some motivation to action instead of just sitting around like everyone else saying stupid stuff, waiting for the next blurry, pixelated action to barely be seen.
Past the artsy ostentation and inane dialogue, the story is a simple updated melding of bit parts of Stoker's book with a retelling of Universal's sequel "Dracula's Daughter" (1936). Nadja's hood is a reference to the one Gloria Holden wore in the predecessor. The parts from the novel mostly consist of character names and traits: Dracula dies, but Van Helsing is still nutty, Lucy falls under the vampire curse again and must be saved, and Renfield is always a slave. Basically, "Nadja" follows the plot of "Dracula's Daughter." She feeds off men and women (the sex being more explicit in this '94 film compared to the '36 one, expectantly), burns her dead father, renounces him and tries to forge a new path, some men try to stop her, she goes back home--completing the circle of where Stoker's Dracula began. Some of the particulars are different this time, including the inclusion of characters from Stoker's book and the addition of a twin brother. The brother is a rather unnecessary character except that it adds to a doubles theme that the movie develops late and becomes potentially incestuous in the end. And Lucy's conversion plays out as a bad episode of the menses. This isn't art. Art is beautiful and intelligent; artsy is pretentious.
(Mirror Note: Van Helsing and son look at some photographs that Lucy, apparently, took of her night with Nadja. Contrary to some other vampire films, this vampire's image can be captured on camera, but, as the pictures are said to reveal, her image isn't reflected in a mirror. There's the horror-film jump-scare cliché when Lucy hallucinates Nadja's image in a mirror. And Van Helsing uses the reflections off his sunglasses several times to confirm vampirism.)