This Geek in Netflix: Vampires
I knew my years of French classes in high school would pay off. Somehow, I was certain that I would wind up an American traveler in Paris, being romanced by some long-haired hippie Parisian. (My taste in men’s personal hygenie has since changed.)
In 2011, my French still hasn’t paid off and the only long-haired hippies I see are really just hipster kids in disguise. (Note to hipster kids: your trendy cowboy boots are not as trendy as you think they are. And they make me want to punch you.)
However(!), also in 2011 (just two days ago, in fact), I had the pleasure of watching the IFC Films release of the Belgian mockumentary “Vampires”. (How they came up with such an original title, I have no idea.)
This lovely little movie hit the festival circuit in April 2010 and has traveled all over the world, hitting Brussels, London, Canada, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Taiwan, Spain… well, certainly more countries than I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. The reviews have been excellent, awards have been won, celebrations must certainly have been had.
Here is where I’d normally go over the actors in the movie, but no one cares about Europeans.
Oh dear, I hurt her Euro-feelings. HA! LIKE THEY HAVE ANY!
Okay, okay, so that’s wrong. But this movie did the smart thing of only casting, from what I can see, one person that might be mildly recognizable to some people somewhere. So it’s kind of pointless to list out non-existent celebrities. If you want to fight about it, send me your challenge with a box of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and I’ll consider it.
The premise of the movie is this: a film company is invited to visit the home of a family of vampires in Belgium in order to create a documentary of the vampire lifestyle within the country. After two… uh, false starts, the third film crew assigned to the project manages to enter into a fairly non-threatening relationship with a delightful blood-sucking brood and begins to document their night-to-night activities.
Comprising the household are George Saint-Germain (+2 for historical reference), his wife, Bertha (who reminds me, in a way, of a rabid St. Bernard), his son, Samson, and his daughter, Grace. Living in the basement are their (vampire) neighbors, Elizabeth and Bienvenu.
I like long walks on the beach, dog blood, and yoga.
What I think makes this movie amazing is not the way it was filmed (sometimes it seemed like the documentary-nature of it was lost) or the music (which was, at times, incredibly overblown), but the relationships between the characters and how real these no-name actors were able to make them– especially Elizabeth.
George and Bertha have a laissez-faire parenting style when it comes to their creations, Samson and Grace, and as a reaction to such, the children manifest this in two very different ways.
I yell that at men too, but I’m not going to go into that here.
Samson is the “true” vampire– he loves playing up the role, loves to go out and hellraise, sometimes much to the distress of his parents, when he breaks what they call The Code (a system of vampire laws held in place by the head vampire of the region).
Grace, on the other hand, dresses all in pink. She’s blonde, rebellious, in love with the idea of being human, of being able to die by way of hanging, drowning, or, yes, dousing herself in gasoline and lighting herself on fire. She keeps her hair blonde, applies a fake tan when she gets up at night, and starts dating a human boy midway through the movie to underscore her rebellion even further.
George does his best to tolerate his daughter’s actions and suggests that she’ll grow out of it eventually, but Bertha, her mother, thinks it’s all disgusting– especially the pink.
Hello, understatement.
The downstairs neighbors are another source of woe for George and Bertha. As what can only be described as orthodox vampires, Elizabeth and Bienvenu are are stuck in the basement until they decide to create a child at which point they will be given a house of their own (another rule of The Code). They hate their unruly upstairs neighbors and their cramped living conditions, but admit that the reason they cannot have “children” of their own is because neither of them can control their own base desires. (Elizabeth, well, she eats babies. Bienvenu, he molests older children. Who knew?)
Which, as they say it, almost comes off with the shame of a couple who desperately wants a child, but have fertility problems.
There’s also The Meat. The Meat is a girl who lives in The Fridge– a cold outside storage area– who takes care of their daily needs and provides them a constant source of fresh blood with some sort of unspoken trust that they’ll do their best not to accidentally kill her. She loves them like family and only goes into the occasional seizure from blood loss– no big thing.
I’d like to Meat her in a dark alley.
We get to learn about coffin-shopping, about how the Belgian government delivers undesirable persons to their door and offers a corpse clean-up once a week. We meet the Belgian vampire government and go to the local school for new vampires to see what they learn and how. We get to see what happens when you take a severely mentally-handicapped person (look at me, being all politically correct!) and turn them into a vampire. (Note: it seems that then you have a retarded vampire. Fuck, there goes the politcal-correctness.)
I wonder who teaches them how to dress themselves. Liza Minnelli?
What is wonderful about this is that, as opposed to many recent mockumentaries, it’s subtle. The underlying humor stays just that– underlying. Yes, I loved A Mighty Wind and Drop Dead Gorgeous as much as anyone, but to see a well-made mockumentary where the people and their relationships could truly be believable (well, if they weren’t vampires)… that’s really neat.
Queue it up on Netflix on Demand and follow the undeaths of the Saint-Germains.
