With My Bloody Valentine in the soundtrack, and Martin Donovan and
Elina Lowensohn with leading roles, Nadja may seem a bit copycatish of
Hal Hartley's Amateur. But this Hal Hartley copycatism is a
grand thing, because Michael Almereyda's Nadja, in my view, is
the greatest film Hal Hartley never directed. It's what Amateur
could've been. Like a Hartley film, Nadja has a quirky
low-budget charm, and less than completely serious dialogue, but it
differs from a film like Amateur by having plot, photography,
and characters that hold up quite well throughout.
And that was a surprise for me, because Nadja is a vampire film,
and in my experience films in that genre before too long become overly
morbid and/or serious for their own good. The recent comedic vampire
flicks starring Eddie Murphy and Leslie Nielson might have been on the
right track by injecting some comedy into the vampire experience, but
they failed miserably. The humor in Nadja, however, works
splendidly. Being a bit cerebral, it is not always laugh out loud
funny, but it is completely fulfilling none the less.
On top of the magnetic performances by Martin Donovanand
Elina Lowensohn, the other roles are also quite well casted, including
Peter Fonda as the paranoid vampire tracker. I must confess that it
really is a treat to see him in small low budget films, because he
seems, well, made for them. Check him out in Love and a .45 for
another non-stereotypical performance, the kind that rarely appear in
the big budget Hollywood productions.
The biggest weaknesses in Nadja are a couple of overly long
segments of pixel-vision filmed scenes. In brief, the mosaic effect is
entertaining, useful and artsy, but when the clean black & white
photography is withheld for too long it just becomes aggravating.