French screen legend Isabelle Huppert’s latest film, which has premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, sees her play a flamboyant aristocratic vampire in Ulrike Ottinger’s “Die Blutgraefin” (“The Blood Countess”).
Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek helped Ottinger, 83, write the script, which is set in some of Vienna’s most alluring locations.
Not that the film is an idyllic picture postcard.
Huppert, 72, plays the titular countess, inspired by the Renaissance-era Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian noble who was accused of numerous murders and vampiric tendencies.
In the film, she returns to life to hunt down a magic book which has the potential to kill all vampires.
Jelinek’s input resulted in a script that’s “very raw and… biting”, according to Huppert, although also with its “sunny” moments.
In a conversation with several journalists, including AFP, Huppert drew a parallel with Jelinek’s work for the “The Blood Countess” and her novel “The Piano Teacher”.
Huppert starred in Michael Haneke’s 2001 adaptation of that book, winning the Best Actress award at Cannes for the role.
“‘The Piano Teacher’ was often navigating between something very dark, but also sometimes… a certain sense of humour, like in the good Austrian tradition,” Huppert said.
Her latest black comedy takes the viewer on a tour of Vienna’s Baroque architecture and cobbled streets, as well into the provinces of the Habsburg Empire.
“I’ve been to Vienna so many times since I was five,” Huppert told reporters on Monday, explaining the layers of memories she has from the city, “whether it was filming, especially this time, when I was on stage, theatre, festivals….”
In the film, Huppert’s countess character returns to life in a scarlet red funeral barge sailing into in the Seegrotte, an underground Viennese lake popular with tourists.
From there she strikes out into the countryside in a suitably stately carriage.
Aside from being a “beautiful homage to Vienna,” Huppert says that “the movie is really timeless and you can’t exactly know when it’s supposed to take place”.
“This is one of the great qualities of the film.”
– Carnivore Conchita Wurst –
Ottinger started writing the film in the early 2000s, contacting Huppert about the project a few years later.
Huppert said of avant-garde German filmmaker Ottinger that “you want to follow her vision, her craziness”.
“She also brings a certain amount of poetry to the screen.”
The film also stars Tom Neuwirth, known for his drag alter ego Conchita Wurst, who won the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria in 2014.
He is “a very good actor and singer,” according to Huppert.
The film has a queer dimension visible in the fascination the countess exerts over the beautiful young women she meets and kills along her journey.
However, Huppert emphasised the social symbolism of a vampire aristocracy that draws its power by feeding on ordinary mortals.
“The world is not fair,” Huppert said, adding that Ottinger makes this point “in a very funny way”.
“You take so many things from so many people,” she says of the modern world.
As for any similarities between herself and her characters, Huppert insists: “I never see any parallel between me and what I play, never.”
And when it comes to immortality, she’s “not sure” she would want to share that with her countess character.
Her outfit at Monday’s press conference — dark sunglasses, toga-like dress, and white gloves — nevertheless evoked her status as a screen icon for the ages.
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