Film star Isabelle Huppert (72) has developed a taste for blood. In her new queer film The Blood Countess, the French actress roams Vienna as a vampire. “It was fun to play a vampire,” she said at the Berlin Film Festival. There, the grotesque comedy from cult director Ulrike Ottinger (83) celebrated its world premiere.
“One expects so much from being a vampire,” the French star added. But the way filmmaker Ottinger handles the genre has given it an extra dimension. Ottinger is a visionary.
Huppert “definitely wanted to play a proper vampire,” Ottinger told the Tagesspiegel. “She said: ‘I want to bite for real at least once!’ I was happy to grant that wish. She actually wanted more dialogue—in French films people tend to talk a lot—but a vampire shouldn’t be so chatty.”
The film is based on a legend about the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Báthory, who around 1600 is said to have killed dozens of girls to drink their blood and thereby gain eternal youth. For the film’s dialogue Ottinger collaborated with Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. The idea for the screenplay came to her in 1998, she said at the world premiere, which drew enthusiastic applause.
Lars Eidinger (“Jay Kelly”, “Dying”) is seen as the therapist Theobald Tandem, though he initially hoped for a different role. “I had expected to be a vampire, but then they sent me the script and it turned out that I’m the vampire’s therapist,” said Eidinger (50).
He nonetheless agreed because he was interested in working with Ottinger, he added. “It’s not often you meet someone who embodies such a punk attitude the way she does.”
In the film, the queer singer Tom Neuwirth (alias Conchita Wurst) also makes several appearances. Birgit Minichmayr (“Andrea divorces herself”, “All the Others”) plays the vampire countess’s maid. And Thomas Schubert (“Red Sky”) portrays the oddball of the vampire family — a vegetarian vampire with a marvelous name: Rudi Bubi Baron von Strudl zur Buchtelau.
