Nadja (1994)

I’m not going to lie, the first half hour of this movie was a fucking chore to sit through.  This is what Paul Morrissey’s approach to filmmaking looks like after twenty additional years of cynicism and a surgical extraction of any traces of camp.  The makers of this are in constant danger of coming off as too good for vampires and almost too good for movies in general.  Eventually, however, I began to understand that a lot of the goofiness was intentional, it did have a central theme, the artificiality was a deliberate stylistic choice, and despite my best efforts my innate Gen-X-ness rose up and I think I ended up kinda liking it?  I was able to detune myself from the last thirty years of cultural progress, devolve into my past flannel-wearing self, and enjoy it for what it was. The fact that it has a soundtrack that is inexplicably wall-to-wall classics helps, even if they’re used as bluntly as possible.

Background imagery is, like, so banal.

This movie couldn’t be more 1994 if it tried, for better and for worse, and watching it made me feel like I was a sophomore in college again, drinking coffee I couldn’t afford far too late on a Wednesday night arguing about nonsense, and I haven’t felt that in a while.  I am utterly and precisely the target market for this movie and I hold that fact entirely against both it and myself, as a member of my generation should.  It dumped a whole bucket of nostalgia over my head so I need to emphasize that this really isn’t a very good movie, despite my grudging fondness.  In its defense it may not be trying to be one.

1994 was deep into the independent film boom of the early 90’s.  ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ had exploded five years before, ‘Reservoir Dogs’ just two, and ‘Clerks’ would release a month afterwards.  It was a frenzy of every film-student and wanna-be filmmaker grabbing cameras and chasing that Sundance dream.  This was before any kind of digital revolution (the first digital movies were still a good eight years away) so a necessary part of this revolution was a downgrade in expected visual quality; as long as the script, acting, and direction was good enough it could be fairly rough around the edges.  Artists being artists it didn’t take long for this to become an aesthetic unto itself, turning into movies like 1995’s ‘Dead Man’ and ‘Kids.’  Alongside the alternative music scene’s embrace of the scruffier elements of 70’s rock (Neil Young, Tom Waits) the cool new kids were also indebted to previously niche filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch.  Particularly Lynch, who produced the movie and has a cameo as a morgue attendant.  The reputations these artists still enjoy today were basically codified in their critical reemergence during these years.

It's also impossible to talk about this movie without mentioning filmmaker Hal Hartley, since this film entirely bites his style.  He was a Sundance darling at the time, his first feature ‘The Unbelievable Truth’ having been nominated for a Grand Jury prize in 1990.  His next few features were also entered into competition and his style became firmly established and very influential.  Said style consisted of a notable degree of artificiality by both his actors and screenplays, where characters offered philosophical monologues seemingly out of nowhere to nobody’s surprise.  They featured stilted and pause-filled dialogue and an understated, dry sense of humor that is easy to miss entirely.  Comparisons were instantly drawn between this style and that of David Lynch.  In a way these movies are like jazz improvisations on standards, you have to have seen a lot of movies to be aware of the deliberate things these movies aren’t doing.  If you know this going in it can be refreshing and add an extra layer of meaning, if you just want to watch a movie it can come off as pretentious, artsy, and frustrating as none of what’s happening on the screen really makes sense.  To quote Ebert’s review: “’The Unbelievable Truth’ is a movie for film buffs.  Those who wander in off the street are likely to be confused, since it seems to be so unsprung and without purpose.  What Hartley is doing, however, is writing a film essay on conventions and cliches and middle-American movie characters.”  All of this is directly applicable to this film.

The cast is a fascinating mix of actors.  The first one that stands out is Peter Fonda, deep in his ‘doing whatever the fuck he wants’ phase of his career, as Dr. Van Helsing.  The title character is played by Elina Löwensohn, fresh off a Hartley movie the year previously, and who’s found steady work in shorts and small parts in the years since.  The married couple whose life Nadja rips apart (that old chestnut) is played by Martin Donovan, who shows up often enough to be a minor ‘hey, it’s that guy,’ and the epically named Galaxy Craze, who has four whole credits on IMDB.  Van Helsing’s sister is played by the great Suzy Amis, just a year away from ‘The Usual Suspects.’  The shocking one, to me at least, was baby Jared Harris as Nadja’s brother Edgar.  They vary wildly in acting ability, not helped by the delicate tonal balance the movie is trying to walk between deadpan comedy and drama, which it often fails at.  I’m not going to single anyone out but it didn’t make the first half hour any easier to sit through.

We are firmly back in the territory of ‘vampire as metaphor’ here.  The plot is pretty bare bones: Nadja is a 200-year-old vampire in New York City who is tired of her bloodsucking routine and longs to change her life.  One night she senses that her father, Dracula, has been killed and decides that this is her opportunity to do so.  She soon meets a woman, Lucy, at a bar slash coffee shop (so the 90’s) who is vaguely unhappy in her marriage.  They go back to Lucy’s apartment and Nadja seduces her.  Meanwhile Lucy’s husband, Jim, has bailed out his uncle, Van Helsing, who was arrested for the murder of Dracula, and they spend the night drinking as Van Helsing drunkenly tells him how Dracula was tired and ready to die.  The next day Lucy is acting strangely and obviously under Nadja’s influence.  Nadja takes the opportunity of her father’s death to visit her estranged brother Edgar, bedridden and wasting away, presumably because he hasn’t been drinking any blood.  She meets his caretaker and Edgar’s lover Cassandara, who is Van Helsing’s sister and Jim’s aunt.  She takes them back to her place.  The spellbound Lucy, followed by Jim and Van Helsing, also ends up at the apartment, and after some wacky hijinks Cassandra flees, followed by Nadja and the rest.  After a mostly implied confrontation and explosion at a mechanic’s Nadja abducts Cassandra and flees back to “the old country,” followed by the rest.  There a very anticlimactic confrontation at an abandoned castle where they stake Nadja, only for the twist to be revealed at the end that Nadja somehow transferred her consciousness into Cassandra and is secretly still alive.

The movie doesn’t particularly care about any of that making sense because that’s not what the movie is about.  The vast coincidences drawing everyone together are simply bluntly stated and shrugged off, fights happen offscreen without real consequences, at a certain point Edgar needs to know what Nadja is doing for plot reasons so suddenly announces he’s about to receive a ‘psychic fax’ from her, does so, and the movie moves on.  This is not the focus of the filmmakers and to complain about the plot is like complaining about the size of the bathrooms on an airplane: sure, it’d be nice to have better ones but that’s not what you’re there for.

Generation X is often characterized as cynical and not caring, of having an overriding attitude of “so what?”  And that’s true, but it’s just the form that rebellion took during those times.  The impulse behind it is the same as the impulse that results in the flippancy of Millennials or the overt earnestness of Gen Z, or whatever narratives we’re placing on specific age brackets these days.  It’s growing up by trying to navigate society, establishing a sense of your own self, and reconciling all of that internally.  Although she ends up being the antagonist of the movie it’s all there in Nadja’s monologue that opens the movie.  She explains to a guy at a bar that she wants to simplify her life but she keeps worrying that all of the choices in her life are just superficial.  After she talks about how much she loves New York, becasuse of course, New Yorkers can never fucking shut up about that.  She also explains that she lives off of money her father got from exploiting the poor and then eats the guy in the back of a car driven by her thrall Renfield.  Supposed liberals who talk a good game but never do anything about it have been with us always.

Everyone in the movie is vaguely dissatisfied and feeling weighed down by personal connections.  Family is seen as a burden, lovers hardly any better.  Nadja resents her father and imposes on her brother, Edgar.  Edgar hates Nadja and wants to have a normal life with his human lover, Cassandra.  Jim is annoyed by his uncle, Van Helsing, and isn’t satisfied with his marriage to Lucy.  Lucy is heavily implied to be in the closet and is easily seduced by Nadja.  The only one who is entirely clear about what he wants is Van Helsing, who is drunk most of the time and played as a bumbling idiot.  Everyone keeps talking about being unsatisfied and wanting to change but for the most part they don’t actually try to change anything.  The only one who actually does is Nadja, who ends up possessing Cassandra, therebye marrying her own brother at the end, which I don’t know what the hell that’s all about.

Rather like ‘Cronos’ this movie is basically using vampires as a metaphor for stasis.  Nadja’s whole deal is that her life doesn’t change no matter how long she lives.  She can’t die, has to suck blood, and she resents that she’s locked into this life.  She does eventually manage to escape it by stealing Cassandra’s, which doesn’t make a lick of sense either logically or metaphorically but I suppose you have to end the move somehow.  Everyone else ends up right back where they were with no resolution, which is pretty far from a happy ending.  Lucy and Jim still have a pretty bad marriage, Cassandra is dead, Edgar is unknowingly married to his sister, and van Helsing for some reason doesn’t feel like killing the very vampiric Edgar, which is never really addressed because I guess they didn’t think about it too hard. 

I need to be clear: just because it has these themes and is pretty consistent about it doesn’t mean I think this movie is any good about exploring them.  The artificial distancing of the audience does not help in any way with sympathizing or understanding these characters.  Since she’s the main character of the movie and her frustration with her life is understandable we relate to Nadja for the first half of the movie until suddenly the movie flips her into the antagonist role and we’re following everyone else trying to hunt her down for reasons which are never really made clear.  Lucy is seen as dissatisfied but although she’s implied to be closeted she spends most of her screen time under varying levels of Nadja’s control so we’re never entirely sure what’s going on with her.  Jim just reacts to everything and looks vaguely baffled and upset.  The only characters who are even remotely sympathetic are Edgar and Van Helsing and that’s entirely down to the actors portraying them.  I kind of get what the movie was trying to do but I need to underline that I don’t think it actually achieves any of it.

I need to mention the soundtrack, which is sparse but incredibly nuts.  The original score is by Simon Fisher-Turner and is sparse, ambient, and mostly absent.  There are a few actual songs sprinkled throughout, including “Soon” and “Lose My Breath” by My Bloody Valentine and the incredibly deep cut “One Way to Go” by The Verve, which was a b-side for their debut single and not available otherwise until the 2016 deluxe reissue of their first album.  There are also two Portishead songs, ‘Roads’ and ‘Strangers,’ which wasn’t cliché yet and seems normal until you check the dates and notice that their debut album only released 22 days before this movie.  Then there’s the song over the end credits, ‘In the Meantime’ by Spacehog (credited as Space Hog), which just seems like an odd choice until you again check the dates and realize that their debut album wouldn’t come out for over another year.  In fact the credits don’t mention a record label, they were likely still unsigned at that point.  Someone in the production was seriously plugged in to the New York music scene.

If nothing else this movie is a pretty great time capsule.  It captures a heady moment when independent filmmakers were doing whatever they could think of to see what worked.  Chunks of it were shot with a PXL2000 camera, a toy camcorder made by Fischer Price in 1987 that recorded incredibly low-resolution black and white video to cassette.  It’s used by exactly the kind of filmmaker you’d expect to use it.  Hip new music was dropped into scenes whether it fit or not.  Everyone smoked, everyone was wearing clothes several sizes too big.  Even if I don’t think it worked and is entirely too clever by today’s standards I can remember what the 90's felt like at the time and recognize that the filmmakers were trying, despite themselves, to make art.