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Michael Almereyda's Nadja (Part 1 of 4)

© Jeremiah Kipp

There are some blurry mornings when you wake up early, sunlight peeking through the shades, when you feel as though you don’t possess the energy or desire to even stand up. You’d rather atrophy under the covers, cloaked from the rigors of daily life. This sensation can also be felt late into the night, in that half-life between sleep and reality. The brain simmers on autopilot and the body is despondent, slow, out of step with the rest of the world. Welcome to the world of the living dead.

That’s the state of mind the protagonists find themselves in throughout Michael Almereyda’s expressionistic modern vampire film, Nadja. They live in a black-and-white nighttown incarnation of New York City. It’s a town of lonely people, many desperately holding on to each other for fear of abandonment. This comes in the form of placing family above everything else (as the title character, played by Elena Lowensohn, does in her European party girl interpretation of Dracula’s daughter) or in relationships whose affection has drifted toward a comfortably numb period of being taken for granted.

Which is not to say that Nadja isn’t ironic or funny. Indie would-be auteur Abel Ferrara trapped himself with humorless proclamations about modern society in his unbearable The Addiction (and both films were lumped into the same mid-1990s “East Village Postmodern Deconstructionalist Vampire Film” trilogy as Larry Fessenden’s memorably sensual Habit, though each film fulfills the genre requirements in unique and original ways.) Almereyda, who understands this horror subcategory so thoroughly he can’t help but playfully reference the films of Jean Cocteau and Tod Browning, gently and playfully dances around the conventions.

The character who comes across as most vivid and alive in this crowd of zombies and sleepwalking humans is Van Helsing, charismatically embodied in a zesty, long-haired Peter Fonda. Tooling around the streets on his bicycle, dragging his poor nephew Jim (Martin Donovan) in tow, our aging Easy Rider incarnation of Van Helsing spins elaborate yarns about hunting Count Dracula and his bastard children (“He was like Elvis in the end! He was just going through the motions!”) This half-mad vampire hunter is first seen with Jim in a coffee shop wolfing down a chocolate croissant and sipping a coffee, having been just bailed out of prison for shoving a wooden stake through someone’s heart. Doesn’t anyone know he destroyed an undead fiend? Who needs a drink?

Point is, Van Helsing has always had a sense of purpose. This puts him miles ahead of poor Jim, whose relationship with copy shop employee/artist/slacker Lucy (Galaxy Craze, plucked straight from the downtown crowd in her oversized flannel coat and attractive short haircut) is best described in his own heartfelt monologue midway through Nadja, to wit:

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