BALLETIC 'DRACULA' BLEEDS ORIGINALITY.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

DEGREE OF difficulty: off the charts. Level of achievement: ditto.

That's ``Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary,'' the latest in faux found-object film art from Guy Maddin, Canada's most distinctive movie weirdo (yes, he's even stranger than Cronenberg).

This is the Guy who makes movies that look like they come from another era that never existed. Arty and funny films, such as the Scanda/prairie freak show ``Tales From the Gimli Hospital'' and ``Careful,'' about an Alpine village where everyone must be very self-controlled lest they trigger a devastating avalanche.

But consider the challenge Maddin set himself when he filmed his hometown Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Bram Stoker's classic vampire tale. Fortunately, the filmmaker had excellent raw material.

The RWB's dancers are exquisite, Texas-born Mark Godden's choreography is inventive, witty and technically dazzling, and Paul Daigle's sets and costumes boast a Gothic flair not seen since the time of F.W. Murnau's brilliant silent movie version of the novel, ``Nosferatu,'' and Tod Browning's 1931 Bela Lugosi starrer.

Still, filming a stage production to look like anything other than a filmed stage production has always been a tall challenge. Maddin conquers it brilliantly, employing fluidly handheld 16-millimeter and Super 8 cameras that swoop and flow with the same rhythmic grace as the dancers. But the director hardly stopped there.

Fades, irises and other transitional tools are smoothly incorporated into the visual music's flow. Although it's mostly presented in black and white, the film is enlivened (or is that enlivened-deadened?) by judicious color splotches, mostly of crimsonized blood. Furthermore, the images constantly morph into tints - chilling blue, sickly green, decaying sepia - that impart both appropriate emotional temperatures and aesthetic nods to the more adventurous silent films that profoundly inspired this work.

But ``Virgin's Diary,'' which unfolds to a score culled from Mahler symphonies and eschews dialogue for coy yet thematically enriching intertitles, goes much further than mere homage to silent expressionism. Maddin has carefully degraded the film's photographic quality to the point where it looks like it was actually unearthed from a vampire's grave - in which it had been buried, practically pre-cinema, around 1897, the year of ``Dracula's'' publication. Far from looking bad or distracting, this effect simply enhances the story's dream-nightmare quality.

That story is presented rather straightforwardly, with all the maidens and monsters, madmen and manly vampire-slayers we're familiar with from countless retellings of the tale. Yet Godden's adaptation, as often presented via those crucial intertitle exclamations, finds fresh, funny veins of xenophobia, sexual panic and even economic paranoia in the tale of the scary Eastern European who tries to buy property and enslave new brides in late Victorian England.

Indeed, as embodied by RWB founder David Moroni C.M.'s imperialistic Van Helsing, the entire presentation can be interpreted as a battle between Western male privilege and the perceived threat to it that gender and racial equality represent. That Dracula is played by an Asian dancer, Zhang Wei-Qiang, and that CindyMarie Small's Mina Murray demands evidence of arousal as proof of Jonathon Harker's (Johnny Wright) love, makes it all the more evident that white-guy hysteria is being satirized every graceful, robust step of the way.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, ``Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary'' is also pretty scary. But what's really frightening, in the best way of course, is how much intelligence and artistry can be so perfectly fitted into 75 low-budget movie minutes.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY - Four stars

(Not rated: violence, sexual situations)

Starring: Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni C.M., CindyMarie Small, Johnny Wright.

Director: Guy Maddin.

Running time: 1 hr. 15 min.

Playing: Landmark's Nuart, West L.A.

In a nutshell: This transposition to film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of the vampire classic looks like a movie made during its 19th-century setting, all fuzzy black and white (and red when blood flows).