French display legend Isabelle Huppert’s newest movie, which has premiered on the Berlin Film Festival, sees her play a flamboyant aristocratic vampire in Ulrike Ottinger’s “Die Blutgraefin” (“The Blood Countess”).
Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek helped Ottinger, 83, write the script, which is ready in a few of Vienna’s most alluring places.
Not that the movie is an idyllic image postcard.
Huppert, 72, performs the titular countess, impressed by the Renaissance-era Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian noble who was accused of quite a few murders and vampiric tendencies.
In the movie, she returns to life to search out a magic e-book which has the potential to kill all vampires.
Jelinek’s enter resulted in a script that is “very raw and… biting”, based on Huppert, though additionally with its “sunny” moments.
In a dialog with a number of journalists, together with AFP, Huppert drew a parallel with Jelinek’s work for the “The Blood Countess” and her novel “The Piano Teacher”.
Huppert starred in Michael Haneke’s 2001 adaptation of that e-book, successful the Best Actress award at Cannes for the function.
“‘The Piano Teacher’ was often navigating between something very dark, but also sometimes… a certain sense of humor, like in the good Austrian tradition,” Huppert mentioned.
Her newest black comedy takes the viewer on a tour of Vienna’s Baroque structure and cobbled streets, as nicely into the provinces of the Habsburg Empire.
“I’ve been to Vienna so many times since I was five,” Huppert advised reporters on Monday, explaining the layers of recollections she has from the town, “whether it was filming, especially this time, when I was on stage, theatre, festivals….”
In the movie, Huppert’s countess character returns to life in a scarlet crimson funeral barge crusing into within the Seegrotte, an underground Viennese lake in style with vacationers.
From there she strikes out into the countryside in a suitably stately carriage.
Aside from being a “beautiful homage to Vienna,” Huppert says that “the movie is really timeless and you can’t exactly know when it’s supposed to take place”.
“This is one of the great qualities of the film.”
Ottinger began writing the movie within the early 2000s, contacting Huppert in regards to the undertaking a couple of years later.
Huppert mentioned of avant-garde German filmmaker Ottinger that “you want to follow her vision, her craziness. She also brings a certain amount of poetry to the screen.”
The movie additionally stars Tom Neuwirth, identified for his drag alter ego Conchita Wurst, who gained the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria in 2014.
He is “a very good actor and singer,” based on Huppert.
The movie has a queer dimension seen within the fascination the countess exerts over the gorgeous younger ladies she meets and kills alongside her journey.
However, Huppert emphasised the social symbolism of a vampire aristocracy that attracts its energy by feeding on strange mortals.
“The world is not fair,” Huppert mentioned, including that Ottinger makes this level “in a very funny way”.
“You take so many things from so many people,” she says of the fashionable world.
As for any similarities between herself and her characters, Huppert insists: “I never see any parallel between me and what I play, never.”
And in terms of immortality, she’s “not sure” she would wish to share that along with her countess character.
Her outfit at Monday’s press convention — darkish sun shades, toga-like costume, and white gloves — nonetheless evoked her standing as a display icon for the ages.
© 2026 AFP