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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Kleptomania, family feuds and Europe’s tallest dam: the strange story of Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film

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In desperation at his antisocial behaviour, the mother of the French new wave pioneer sent him to work in ‘purgatory’. It was to inspire Operation Concrete, Godard’s only documentary

When Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, Breathless, exploded on to cinema screens in 1960, it was heralded as an instant classic. However, his directorial career did not start with Breathless, but rather five years earlier with Operation Concrete, a remarkable documentary with an even more poignant backstory.

In 1953, when Godard’s mother, Odile, sent him to work as a labourer on the construction of the Grande Dixence dam in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, it represented a desperate last throw of the dice for her wayward 22-year-old kleptomaniac son.

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