'Dracula' Takes Dancing Lessons By MIKE RUBIN It opens like a scene from countless horror films: under cover of darkness, winged gargoyles emerge from the shadows in the bedroom of a forbidding manor, surrounding the sleeping lady of the house. Then things get really strange: darting to and fro, the horned beasts cavort on the bedposts and shake their demon-tailed derrières, looking more like strippers from HBO's "G-String Divas" than 19th-century apparitions from Bram Stoker's "Dracula." As the maiden tosses and turns, the creatures suddenly become a pirouetting corps de ballet. Renfield, I don't think we're in Transylvania anymore. There are few cinematic genres hoarier than the vampire film, but it's probably safe to say that there hasn't been any previous effort quite like the filmed version of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary" by the Canadian director Guy Maddin. Stoker's nightmarish classic seems ready-made for Mr. Maddin; few filmmakers have been more successful at conjuring a strikingly surreal dream world. At 47, after five features, Mr. Maddin has become Canada's most distinctive filmmaker. David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan may be better known, but only Mr. Maddin has a visual style so unmistakable that a glance at a single frame is enough to determine its authorship. Awash in anachronism and artifice, Mr. Maddin's films employ a vocabulary largely abandoned in the 1920's — dialogue title cards, hammy overacting, painted backdrops and cardboard sets — as well as grainy black-and-white film stock and double exposures. His work is as far from both kitchen-sink realism and studio glitz as Manitoba is from Hollywood. Given the limited means available to a self-taught independent filmmaker who calls Winnipeg home, movies like "Tales From the Gimli Hospital" (1988) and "Archangel" (1990) — shot almost exclusively on studio sets — are a triumph of blue-light-special production design. Mr. Maddin usually acts as his own cinematographer, and his luminously overexposed black-and-white images are wonderfully evocative of cinema's silent era. Reinventing film by revisiting its origins, he leaps from German Expressionism to Soviet montage in a single cut. These stylistic excesses are playful rather than pretentious, as Mr. Maddin owns a devilishly offbeat sense of humor and a deliriously purple ear for dialogue — that is, when there's dialogue at all; "Dracula" is silent but for the strains of two Mahler symphonies. Mr. Maddin hasn't released a feature since the disappointing "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs" in 1997. His six-minute silent film "The Heart of the World" (2000), however, is perhaps the most lauded short in recent memory. An apocalyptic love triangle told in Soviet-propaganda style (think Eisenstein), "Heart" was as entertaining and energetic as any full-length work released that year. In addition to "Dracula" (now playing at Film Forum in Manhattan, through May 27), another new offering of Mr. Maddin's, "Cowards Bend the Knee," a wildly absurdist pseudo-autobiographical silent serial, was recently shown at the TriBeCa Film Festival. Mr. Maddin just finished filming his next feature, "The Saddest Music in the World," which is not only his return to "talkies" but a musical to boot; based on a script by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, it stars Isabella Rossellini as a legless beer baroness who sponsors a contest to determine which nation produces the world's most sorrowful music. "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary" is Mr. Maddin's most accessible film yet, tethered as it is to Stoker's familiar story. The Victorian milieu is an ideal setting for Mr. Maddin's favored themes of repressed desire and romantic betrayal and his affinity for lurid melodrama (typified by the 1992 "Careful," which unfolded in a snowy mountain village where the inhabitants live in perpetual fear that their unleashed libidos might trigger an avalanche). Like most of Mr. Maddin's other work, "Dracula" is visually sumptuous and audaciously hilarious, at once beautiful and goofy. Source: The New York Times

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