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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Battleship Potemkin review – Eisenstein’s explosive movie still burns bright

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With a new score by Pet Shop Boys, the Russian director’s masterpiece remains a stunning paean to revolution

Here for its hundred-year anniversary is a restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering silent classic from 1925, itself commissioned for the 20-year anniversary of the events it showed and reimagined. It is in black-and-white of course, apart from the vivid red flag flown from the battleship’s mast. This rerelease is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Pet Shop Boys in 2005; it is a fervent, continuous score but not, for me, one that engages fully with the drama’s light-and-shade. It also perhaps reopens the debate about when and how a silent-movie musical accompaniment should be content to fall silent in favour of discreet ambient background sound.

The subject is a 1905 anti-Tsarist mutiny on an Imperial Russian Navy battleship in the Black Sea near Ukraine. It is an uprising of sailors demoralised by losses in the Russo-Japanese war, resentful of the officers’ arrogance and incompetence, electrified by news of revolutionary enthusiasms on land, and finally triggered by the maggot-infested meat they were expected to eat.

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