DRACULA'S FIANCEE (2002)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Though I've seen about ten Jean Rollin flicks, I've never reviewed any. I confess I find it hard to get a handle on Rollin's almost plotless exhibitions of female pulchritude, most often in the form of willowy lady vampires. And yet, though I don't think most Rollin movies have much thematic content, he does have an individual style that sets him apart from thousands of routine sexploitation filmmakers. FIANCEE is one of the last three films he directed before he passed in 2010. 

Now, while there exist dozens of films which invoke the name "Dracula" without having any relation to the character, or to any aspect of the Stoker novel, FIANCEE has both. Stoker's DRACULA is a rich work with more symbolic layers than all of Rollin's films combined-- or all the Hammer vamp-films too, for that matter. Yet for FIANCEE Rollin isolated one major trope from Stoker and made it his own: the trope of innocence seduced by timeless evil. For most of the novel, the king-vampire stalks Mina Murray, and almost makes her into one of his own kind-- and yet Mina becomes, in many ways, Dracula's foremost opponent, summoning forth a primal goodness to battle archaic evil.

 Yet Rollin inverts that formula for his own purposes. The viewer never knows much about Isabella (Cyrille Gaudin), the "fiancee" of the title. There's a toss-off remark by the nuns who keep her prisoner that Isabella shares the genes of Dracula, which loosely implies that she, unlike Mina, is some descendant of the vampire. Further, Isabelle is entirely willing to become joined with the dark lord, and though it's not clear exactly what will happen if the two of them are united in unholy matrimony, the nuns are eager to prevent her nuptials, as are the film's primary POV characters. An elderly somewhat psychic professor with no proper name and his young male student Eric (Jacques Orth, Denis Tallaron) have dedicated themselves to preventing the wedding of Isabella and Dracula. It takes them a while to gsther intelligence, as they first engage in colloquy with a (very good looking) village madwoman in order to learn Isabella's presence in the nunnery. Yet, even though technically the madwoman doesn't have much to do with the story, thematically she reflects Isabella's true nature, for the fiancee seems able to spread some virulent madness to her captors. Rollin gets a lot of incidental humor from the weird behavior of the nuns, by the way.

In many similar stories, Dracula would be stage-managing a bunch of lackeys to secure Isabella's release. Instead, he seems to exist in some sidereal world, gaining access to the mortal world through the venue of a grandfather-clock. The vampire-lord does so little in FIANCEE that this may be one of the only Dracula movies in which Dracula is less central to the story than the maiden he seeks to violate-- which would make the FIANCEE title unusually appropriate. Isabella, Dracula's willing bride, spreads madness among the nuns, and the mostly feminine beings who assemble for her wedding seem more like Isabella's unholy bridesmaids. I'm not sure if Rollin was hip to the cinematic tradition of the "monster mash"-- it doesn't appear in any of his works I've seen, in contradistinction to, say, what one sees in the films of Paul Naschy. But if Rollin had just wanted an excuse to film a lot of scenes with hot monster-women, he could have just made all the bridesmaids vampires. Instead, Rollin's script takes the trouble to make up a weird term for non-vampire creatures-- "Parallels," for whatever reason-- and the wedding party includes at least two non-vamps: an "Ogress" and "a She-Wolf," though naturally Rollin blows no bucks on makeup or appliances. Incidentally, the small role of the She-Wolf is played by frequent Rollin collaborator Brigitte Lahaie.

So Isabella gets free, and the Professor and Eric try to stop her from hooking up with the Big Vamp-- and after a lot of incidents, they fail, and the unholy union apparently takes place. Rollin's script also tosses out various psuedo-poetic bits of dialogue, but he's never been a filmmaker known for scintillating repartee. So the film just kind of ends on a dispiriting note, though as I said it's hard to feel much when one doesn't know what's at stake. But it's a nice-looking film, maybe one of Rollin's best in a formal sense.