As a filmmaker, Albert Serra is certainly one of the more challenging for audiences, a director who seems to intentionally drag out his scenes, offering minimalistic slice of life type sequences that offer little substance. His style always seems to rub me the wrong way, almost being intentionally obtrusive, and while Serra's latest, The Story of My Death, doesnt see the filmmaker change his approach, that fact that it's essentialy an arthouse period piece chronicling an encounter between Casanova and Dracula left me intrigued. Centered around an aging Casanova, whose womanizing has tempered considerably, much of The Story of My Death follows on his adventures through the coutryside, meeting people and writing his memoirs with his new valet. Headed towards the Carpathian mountains, the majority of The Story of My Death finds Casanovia wax poetic, attempting to stay in touch with the changing times. It's only about two thirds of the way through the film that the Prince of Darkness is introduced, with Serra slowly and subtlely shifting the film's aesthetic to a much darker pallette, brooding with a sense of death. The Story of My Death is not a film very interested in its two famous characters, only using them to create a strainge, absurdist 18th centruy period piece featuring the trademark wit and philosophical bantering. Serra uses this period piece setting and Casanova to juxtapose love and lust, rationalism and romantacism, seeing Casanova venture towards the darker passions of Vlad the Impaler aka Dracula. Wth The Story of Life and Death, Albert Serra still shows his penchant for irrating the viewer with long, drawn out sequences, but it's hard to deny the film's artistic and thematic merits.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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