By Michael Roddy

There could not have been a more vivid onscreen fashion statement among all the almost 300 films shown at this year’s Berlinale, which ends on Sunday, than French actress Isabelle Huppert in a blood-red dress with endless blood-red train and matching razor-sharp fingernails as the Hungarian queen of the vampires in “Die Blutgräfin” (The Blood Countess).

Huppert, rather than camping it up, pulls off the amazing trick of portraying Elizabeth Báthory, a real-life 16th-century Hungarian serial killer from a noble family, as someone who might plausibly be circulating in the murky high society of modern day Vienna. Plausible, that is, until she encounters a young woman dressed delectably all in white like a snow princess and sucks her blood-dry in the marbled ladies room of a fashionable venue.

The Austrian-Luxembourg-German production, helmed by veteran German avant-garde director Ulrike Ottinger and co-written by her and Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize winning author of “The Piano Teacher”, is one of those hard-to-categorise films that could become a cult classic, like “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, or disappear without a trace.

It has a tendency to pick low-lying fruit, such as portraying one of the high-society vampires, who are holding a ball to welcome the countess back after a centuries-long absence, as a vegetarian whose nickname is Rudi Bubi (Thomas Schubert). To overcome a dietary preference that is unusual if not unique among vampires, Rudi Bubi is seeing a therapist played by well-known German actor Lars Eidinger. The shrink, who advises Rudi to eat red meat, really doesn’t get it, until he is invited to a posh vampire dinner thrown in a plush cabin on a Prater amusement park ferris wheel. One of the female vampires slips under the table and does her thing, which at first he thinks is sexy, until, of course, it’s fatal.

There is, inevitably, a bumbling society of vampire hunters hot on the trail but never on the mark, plus an ancient book the countess is intent on finding — and destroying — because any vampire who reads even a few words of it will be reduced to tears — and will lose his or her vampirability (or whatever the scientific term is). The film follows its characters through famous and scenic settings of Habsburg-era Vienna and includes a guest appearance by a singer who won the Eurovision song contest (of course) but must not be named. In all, harmless (but is anything with vampires really harmless?) fun.

The crypts, or at least the underground world of Vienna, make another appearance in the competition film “The Loneliest Man in Town”. It is a poignant portrayal of the real-life 80-year-old Austrian blues player Al Cook, whose birth name is Alois Koch and who proudly says he has never been to America — even to the Mississippi Delta where the blues was born. He has learned everything from records by the likes of blues great Robert Johnson and taught himself English — American southern English — from an interview LP made by Elvis Presley, and made a living and career of it.

The MacGuffin here is that Cook is the last holdout tenant in a period Vienna apartment building slated for demolition, soon, so the developers want him out. Cook, who has a studio in the cellar, including a small shrine to his late wife, with photo, plus all the musician paraphernalia, knows the time of reckoning is coming.

He is nevertheless surprised when the lights go out while he is settling down to celebrate Christmas by his tree, drinking a champagne toast to his wife. Resourceful Cook has used candles for his Christmas lights — so score one for him over the developers. But as the electricity remains off, the water likewise and the developer’s fat and tatooed fixer opens Cook’s door with his duplicate keys and says he’s going to live there and eat all his ham sandwiches until he agrees to go, the writing is on the wall.

A repeated shot of a giant digger claw tearing down a similar building drives home the message that the city’s redevelopment can have an ugly side. But whether you will warm to this movie, which is lovingly photographed and includes beautiful details of Cook’s blues book and LP collection (mostly vinyl, of course), will depend on how you react to the fact that in reality Cook’s apartment was being renovated, not torn down. So…

Other Berlinale notes:

Most Dangerous Dance Routine: Four gay men dancing at night in the curbside lane of a busy six-lane highway in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), with cars, taxis and mopeds whizzing aroumd them and honking. They are dancing to the music of the late avant-garde black American composer Julius Eastman in the music-ballet film “Joy Boy: A Tribute to the Music of Julius Eastman”. Eastman, who died homeless in 1970 aged 49, was a contemporary and sometime colleague of American modernists John Cage and Morton Feldman. But his wild, flamboyant gay streak, combined with drugs, that eventually did him in — and alienated him from Cage — is vividly captured in this film. The dance was performed without a permit, without cooperation from the police or authorities, and in spite of the deep hostility in Kinshasa to gay people, one of the creatives associated with the film said at a screening. Awesome, and terrifying.

Best Earworm, German-language version: “Ciao amore mio” – Fuffifufzich Live for Reeperbahn Festival Collide. Used in the closing credits of the German-language competition film “Etwas Ganz Besonderes” (Home Stories) The lyrics are, methinks, well, investigate. https://youtu.be/pAPro2h6PXA?si=tvYgJDATwfPgAbNt