Your Daily Dracula – Lucy en Miroir (2004)
A 44-minute experimental film by writer-director Raphaël Bassan, this is among the most marginal of the Dracula-themed marginalia I’ve covered in YDD.
Here’s Bassan’s director’s statement, heard in voice-over … ‘ a film essay on the nature and ambiguity of feelings linked to an artistic project which is both the subject and object of the film. Several off screen voices — that of the film maker/narrator and of his actors — elaborate an episodic fiction that is founded on the existential as well as the artistic domain. Two women recall a shared lover who lost contact with reality in order to pursue an artistic quest. The oral confrontation with the man centers on the polymorphic exigesis of Godard’s Le Mépris. Diverse interpretations that treat, in each sequence, a different aspect of this classic film. This new commentary at work in the genesis of the film is just one possibility among others. The central trunk of Lucy en miroir is also commented by diverse visual proposals (real or abstract) and sound (the music is omnipresent and creates itself a subtext that multiplies the experimental dimension of the film) before the filmmaker returns, at the end, to his intention: give open keys to his film.’
Most of the film consists of two characters with a shared name – Lucy E (Elodie Jane Imbeau) and Lucy S (Anne-Sophie Brabant) sitting on a park bench or wandering together, remembering their shared lost love Jonathan (voiced by Gérard Courant) … which somehow relates to the Godard film Le Mépris (aka Contempt) but also to ‘Le Cauchemar de Dracula de Terence Fisher’. Bassan also claims the film was prompted by the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. It’s a pretty, if slightly somnolent watch – the narration is a drone that mingles with the music … the women are interesting presences rather than characters (Imbeau was also in a 2000 short adaptation of Carmilla) … and any meanings are at once set out bluntly in the narration and stubbornly obscure.
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