Nosferatu! who stars in Spongebob sometimes.

This is a movie review, and here movie review is defined as a way of ameliorating guilt at not writing/editing fiction.  Also because I have this uncomfortable obsession with all things film.

This is the first theater I went to in Paris.  I didn't know French theaters only unlock their doors ten minutes before showtime so I spent a good half hour loitering uncomfortably around the theater.  I am so nostalgic right now.

So here’s some semi-quick and pretty dirty and altogether unstructured thoughts on watching Werner Herzog’s weird 1979 remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu, with Klaus Kinski as Dracula.

Which is a whole different weirdness from his remake of Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant but relevant thoughts on coke and iguanas as plot devices will be discussed elsewhere I’m sure.

I forgot to put a current movie I wanted as #1 in my Netflix queue, so this silly movie from my Herzog phase came in the mail next in line.  While initially I was pissed, I remembered the massive wellsprings of affection I have for both Werner and Klaus, and, let’s be real, vampires. 

It's based almost exactly on Murnau’s plotwise.  Almost.  Since Stoker’s estates’ copyright had run out, unlike when Murnau made his, the characters kept their real names: Dracula, Lucy, Jonathan.

Nosferatu follows the plot that is familiar to goths, horror fans, and English majors.  Sweet young dude goes to Transylvania to sell a house to Dracula, but Dracula is much more interested in sweet dude’s wife and homeland, so bites dude and goes off to England to menace said wife and homeland until he is killed (spoiler!) by Dr. Van Helsing, who is never as hot as Hugh Jackman was in Van Helsing.

Hello gorgeous.  I bet our family quotes this movie more than any other family ever.  We chose to watch it as a comedy.

Except while the original is so powerful, a nightmarish wordless thing piercing right from and to your subconscious, this remake is a dreamier retelling.  Still a nightmare, but after you wake up.  It’s almost lulling.  I will break down and throw “lush” and “oneiric” right into the mix too.  The filming is a weird mélange of deference to and disinterest in the original.

The film begins with POV shots of mummies, and the camera gaze lingers like you yourself might linger on certain aspects—like the silent screams of the open mouths, or the strange fact that below desiccated naked bodies they are wearing shoes.  Herzog sets the tone here—he lets shots linger from a middle distance, not framing anything or pulling back or forward to elicit reaction.  It immediately cuts to two kittens playing with a locket, filmed in the same polite yet intimate/invasive gaze.  You don’t see the kittens again really but anytime the little dude Jonathan and his wife Lucy are home together there’s always this insistent high-pitched mewing and the sickly distillation that is Northern European sunlight.

The only kitten-free shot before things go south.

Herzog is always pretty adorably unconcerned with plot and character, preferring to obsess over forces, nature, and forces of nature—the more violent and implacable and ineluctable the better.  It takes Jonathan a good half hour to get to Dracula’s castle, through desolate shot after desolate shot.

This sort of thing like for an hour.  Exactly what you'd expect from a foreign film actually.

We’re always perched behind a rock or outcropping, unconcerned, watching him drift in and out of frames with cool purpose.  Herzog uses this method to great effect in all of his movies, letting the images do the work for him.  There’s this great silent shot of the ship with everyone dead coming into port in the canals; floating slowly and scraping into the sides.

Or right after the boat, the hilarity of an awkward Dracula scurrying off with his coffin in arm.  One thing that always gets overlooked is how funny Herzog is.  Like the first time Dracula shows up in Jonathan’s room.  I was laughing so hard.

Oh...hey...I thought you were asleep...uh...what's up, buddy?

All the characters actually go about their business with a sort of implacable distaste.  Especially Dracula.  He is not happy about his circumstances or what he does.  He is polite and respectful in his demeanor.  But he is going to drink you dry, however pleasant your other interactions.  It’s just kind of an embarrassing circumstance that everyone should get over now.

He spends the whole movie making this face.

Kinski is just such a perfect vampire.  Before this I'd only seen him in his more bombastic roles; it was strange seeing him so melancholy, although that tortured-animal look he does so well (especially in Woyzeck and Fitzcarraldo) is used to full effect.  Even in makeup Kinski’s face is always weirdly mesmerizing.  He’s close to being good looking, but it seems as if his personality has warped his features.  His nose is too sharp, his eyes too close and intense, and his mouth too large and mobile.  It was unsettling seeing such a pair of lips on Nosferatu actually.  I thought of Ralph Fiennes playing Voldemort—a pale hideous monster except for those sad eyes and full lips.  Of course Kinski is much better at “repulsive” since he tends towards the compelling rather than attractive.  As far as my tastes go anyway.

How German can you look?  THIS GERMAN.

Also, presaging vampire films today, Dracula talks about his feelings for like 60 percent of his dialogue.

Seriously, my friend, she does not care.

This movie, following the original’s unusual lead, is not your standard gothy conflation of sexy death and deathy sex that makes the archetypal vampire story, although it’s an undercurrent for sure.  The big final bloodsucking scene at the end with Dracula and Lucy is not remotely erotic as it’s mostly done elsewhere.  It’s more tender than anything, although that’s not the right word for two beings that are causing each other’s death as they both give into each other.  Sad is probably the word I am looking for.

This shot and composition looks like a Füssli painting which I never even noticed before.

At first I was irritated that the film was obviously made in the seventies.  They’re wearing period costumes, but something about the hairdos and actor’s looks scream seventies.  Lucy has her hair obviously crimped, for example.

But to get super meta and overheated and loopy, after a while I felt this was appropriate.   In a metaphysical-whatever sense all these characters have been going through these same motions for the last fifty years.  They are men and women and monsters caught in a loop.  The reluctance and fatigue of Dracula, the way Lucy gives in, the stony certainty with which Jonathan rides to and from his death—I felt like we were checking in on these characters after they had been going through the same motions for the last half-century, and will continue to do so as long as there are film students.  Which in a sense we were.  They are tired.  And like all Herzog’s subjects, real or fictional, they can do nothing but succumb to forces greater than themselves.

The end is a little bleaker but I think it works.  This narrative will after all be going on indefinitely.

I watched the little making-of featurette of course.  Herzog is always so funny to me.  He was still really young and ambitious and open.  There are a couple of just artless moving moments seeing the director and lead work together, and citizens of the little Dutch town they filmed in, and seeing baby Herzog admit, with a little laugh and distinctive Teutonic accent, “Yes, all of my narratives come from pain.  Pain is my subject.”

Haha who is a German boo?  YOU ARE.

Should you see it?  Of course.  But it is not the first Werner Herzog movie you should see.  Grizzly Man is a good starting point—it’s where I started anyway.  And you have to see Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre the Wrath of God of course.  This is not his best.  It’s an homage.  It was not meant to be his best.  But it is an adorable little project and I loved watching it.

PHEW does that count as writing I hope?

If you haven't seen it before, here's a parody of his documentaries that hits pretty close to home.