Et Mourir de Plaisir / Blood and Roses (1960) [French cut]

              As anyone who’s really into vampire history will be very happy to tell you, the novella ‘Carmilla’ by Sheridan Le Fanu was published in 1872 and predates the work of Bram Stoker by a cool 27 years.  It draws from the same folklore that informed Stoker’s work while emphasizing different aspects of it and provides the basis for a lot of other vampire movies, many of which we’ll shortly be running into because its completely textual inclusion of lesbianism can be bent with very little effort into easy exploitation material and also allows you to defend yourself that you’re totally basing your movie on classical literature, so back off.

French is such a pretty language.

              1960’s ‘Et Mourir de Plaisir’ is not exploitation as it would come to be known, and it’s also not a very close adaptation of the original material.  It borrows the names Carmilla and Mircalla, the idea of vampires, and has some hints of same-sex attraction, but that’s about it.  Director Roger Vadim, better known for ‘And God Created Woman’ and ‘Barbarella,’ just so you know who we’re dealing with here, turns the basic sketch of the idea of the premise of the novella into another examination of a frustrated woman doing impulsive and rebellious things.  A triple feature of ‘And God Created Woman,’ ‘The Night Heaven Fell,’ and this would work pretty well, I think.

              This is our first movie, but far from the last, which features the vampire as metaphor, albeit a pretty shaky metaphor that doesn’t really hold up and isn’t clear in what it’s trying to say.  This is not a movie that is concerned with body counts or gore or ever really confirming whether the vampire is actually a vampire or just thinks she is.  The conceit of the movie is to follow the fracturing of our protagonist’s psyche and uses her familial history of vampirism accusations and her subsequent self-identification as such to illustrate a break in her mental state which allows her to lash out.  Of course, this movie also features a casket that opens by itself and fangs marks on necks because Vadim is a lot of things but deft is not one of them.

              The movie stars Annette Vadim (nee Stroyberg) as Carmilla.  Stroyberg was only in four films and had a fairly eventful life and is perfectly fine in the movie.  Carmilla is staying with her distant cousin Leopoldo de Karnstein at his estate.  Her exact position in life is never very firmly established, throwaway lines state she’s the end of a distant branch of the family and owns a lot of land in Austria.  It’s made clear she’s wealthy, related to Leopold, has known him since they were kids, and is in love with him.  All of this information is never conveyed through anything other than characters bluntly stating facts and flat reaction shots of Carmilla’s face that, in context, mean jealousy, frustration, or longing, apparently. 

The movie’s plot begins with the announcement of Leopold Karnstein’s engagement to Georgia Monteverdi.  She’s apparently been friends with Carmilla for a long time and seems to be living on the estate as well.  During the party where they begin planning the actual party celebrating the engagement it’s established that the Karnsteins were once known as a family of vampires.  Luckily right there in the same room as the party there’s a prominent portrait on display of Mircalla Karnstein, their distant ancestor and most famous of the ancestral vampires, and the movie very pointedly establishes both that she looks exactly like Carmilla and that a vampire’s touch kills flowers.  They tell the story about Mircalla being spurned by a lover and then killing his subsequent wives, all the while the camera does this weird POV thing where it wanders around the party and the guests all stare directly down the lens.  It’s very artistic and I have no idea what they were going for.

The other thing established at the party is that there will be a big fireworks display set off right in the middle of the old monastery ruins where the locals think the vampires were all buried.  It’s not very hard to see where this is all going. 

It’s during the subsequent party, the one with the fireworks, that it becomes clear that Carmilla is not happy at all about the marriage.  She stays up in her room getting drunk and loudly playing records.  Leopold comes up and yells at her to attend, which she angrily agrees to, but instead of wearing the dress he tosses at her she wanders upstairs where a dress identical to the one in Mircalla’s painting is hanging, because apparently they just own that.  Later during the fireworks we seen Carmilla wandering far from the party wearing the dress when suddenly those fireworks set off some buried German munitions left over from the second world war and the ruins start to go up in actual explosions.

Here's where the narrative bifurcates, because one of two things happens here and the movie spends the rest of its runtime carefully avoiding coming down on one side or the other.  Either Carmilla is lured to the ruins of the still-exploding monastery by her now-freed ancestor Mircalla, entombed those centuries ago after her brides-killing spree, who either replaces or possesses her, or Carmilla suffers a mental break, wanders into the explosions in a daze, and comes out believing herself to be Mircalla as a way of avoiding her problems.  Either way we see our main actress wander amidst explosions and even all these decades away I got worried because I do not trust that adequate safety precautions were taken.

The movie from this point technically hits of all the beats for a vampire narrative.  Carmilla begins to scare animals in her presence, avoids the sun, stops eating properly, and gives off super creepy vibes, even more so that she was before.  She starts wandering the countryside at night in the big white Mircalla dress, giving rise to stories among the servants.  She becomes fixated on one of these servants, Lisa, and eventually follows her home one night and then chases her in an extended day-for-night sequence that ends with Lisa dead at the bottom of a cliff with ambiguous marks on her neck.  This is, by the way, the only victim in the entire movie if you don’t count Carmilla’s eventual fate.  The movie really seems to hate that it has to include these.  Other than the scene with Lisa all of the vampire stuff is established in lines between background characters or Carmilla briefly complaining about how hot the sun is.  What it’s really interested in is arch, fractured dialogue as it follows Carmilla around being various shades of annoying and everyone being variously frustrated and intrigued by her. 

So let’s get to the disappointing amount of lesbianism.  The conversations around this movie almost always start and stop there, and it’s clearly the topic that the filmmakers were pushing to try to get some eyeballs on screen, but there is little actual content here.  There are about three scenes with any kind of lesbian subtext.  For the record it’s clearly intentional, the movie is obviously working that area, but it doesn’t have any interest in seriously examining or portraying the subject. 

Most of the marketing material that exists seems to focus on the scene between Carmilla and Georgia in a greenhouse towards the end of the movie, and it’s true that that’s the closest it gets to portraying some amount of same-sex attraction.  Carmilla kinda sorta gets all up in Georgia’s face and starts to kiss her, but it’s not portrayed as sexy, it’s a scene where Carmilla is acting all weird and menacing and Georgia is freaking out.  She had just offered her friend a rose as some kind of peace offering, the tension between them having increased ever since Carmilla started acting nuts, but Carmilla just crumples the rose deliberately in her fists and says things like “Carmilla is dead.” 

There’s also a scene where the two women sit under a tree after chasing a fox and Carmilla looms over a reclining Georgia, aping both the motions of going to kiss her or going to bite her, and then there’s the sequence leading into the ending where Carmilla visits Georgia at night while she’s sleeping, leaning over her and leading into a dream sequence that I’m sure was fun to storyboard.  It's all effects works and weird staging.  And that’s basically your lot, you can read a lot into a lot if you really need to, and I’m sure this movie is helpful in rounding out basic ‘Top twenty queer horror classics’ lists, but other than referencing the original story and getting some decent shots to drum up some interest from the boys in the crowd the movie isn’t actually interested in the subject.

In the end, after attacking Georgia and leaving some bite marks on her neck that have no other in-story explanation except that she’s really a vampire, Carmilla wanders in the countryside and eventually next to the old monastery, where it’s been established the military is setting off the rest of the buried explosions.  She gets knocked over by the detonation and falls off a small cliff and down onto a wooden barricade that impales her through the chest.  The movie ends by showing that Leopold and Georgie did indeed get married and the last shot holds on a flower falling apart in Georgia’s hand, implying she’s a vampire now, or something.

This is not a bad movie by any means, just not one that grabbed me on any level.  As a vampire movie it’s not a vampire movie except in a technical sense.  This is very much a movie from 1960’s Italy and your enjoyment of it is entirely predicated on your enjoyment of such.  The portrayal of the landed gentry, the arch conversations, the scenes of people acting dramatically and reacting dramatically, it’s all fairly well done, but I’m not sure if either I didn’t get what the movie was trying to say or if the movie didn’t have much to say other than, "Women, am I right?"  But in Italian.