The Blood Countess review – Isabelle Huppert reigns supreme in a surreal vampire fantasia

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Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the ...
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La Syndicaliste review Isabelle Huppert is fascinating in blood-boiling injustice drama

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French film about real-life trade union whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, accused of inventing her assault

‘My name is Maureen Kearney. I didn’t lie. I didn’t make anything up.” This French drama about a blood-boiling real-life case of injustice is the story of whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, who for four years lived with a criminal record: falsely convicted of wasting police time, accused of inventing her rape. It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect. (Kearney is actually Irish, but has lived and worked in France since the mid 1980s; Huppert plays her as French).

Adapted from a book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre, this is a film of two halves, beginning with the whistleblowing. It’s 2011, and Kearney is a powerful trade union official, going into battle for the 50,000 staff at French nuclear engineering giant Areva in her armour of full makeup and blond hair so immaculately blow-dried it could deflect arrows. Kearney has the trade minister’s number in her phone and can summon President Sarkozy to a meeting. (Rumour has it he called her “a hysteric in a skirt”.) She turns whistleblower after being handed documents revealing secret plans to sell off France’s nuclear technology to China.

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