Story of My Death
Taking a counterintuitive approach to legendary literary and screen icons, Catalan “slow cinema” director Albert Serra’s offbeat period drama engineers an unlikely encounter between Casanova and Dracula, only to depict their notorious carnal appetites as pitiful and sleazy rather than dangerously irresistible. Aging libertine Casanova (Vicenç Altaió) and needy, impotent Dracula (Eliseu Huertas) compete to seduce the daughters of a devout farmer (Xavier Pau) in the Carpathian mountains. But the wily young women prove far more interested in playing these pompous predators off each other in a bid to subvert oppressive patriarchal rules in Serra’s droll and deadpan reimagining.
Vicenç Altaió, Lluís Serrat, Eliseu Huertas
- Notes From Sebastián LelioAlbert Serra subverts expectations and creates a film that defies genre classification, a film that is slippery and enigmatic. The very thought of a meeting between Casanova and Dracula marks a completely unique expressive territory and speaks of the oblique strategies Serra uses to explore his interests: the contrast between the logical and the irrational, between philosophical depth and utter triviality, between law and desire, and quite literally, in one of my favorite passages of the film, between feces and gold. In this deliberately pompous, flamboyant fable, Serra invites us to inhabit this impossible universe by using improvisation with actors, employing cameras as tools to capture the subtlest levels of human emotion. His story is narrated from the leftovers, from behind the scenes—it is as if the true scenes of the film have been denied to us and we are invited to see the unofficial part, the hidden side of a narrative that in the hands of a more traditional director would have been completely familiar, but in Serra’s hands becomes a mysterious, lunar, dark, repulsive and also pathetically beautiful universe. With STORY OF MY DEATH, Serra has managed to create something akin to a small, esoteric masterpiece.