Bloodsuckers

Playful mix of history, philosophy, literature and cinema. Whether it rises above enjoyable post-modern pastiche to leave anything profound or perduring with viewers, time will tell. Lots of dry comedy enlivens proceedings, however.

The initial premise is a joke. An earnest discussion group who are reading Marx stumble on a passage where he labels the bosses as vampires, sucking the blood out of the workers. Although the leader insists that this is a metaphor, some participants take the master literally and start viewing the rich with new wariness.

When the millionairess heroine decides that the Russian refugee she has taken into her mansion needs his sensibility enlarged, she instructs her assistant to leave Proust on his pillow. The assistant, unfulfillably in love with her, decides to discover the secret by reading the book himself. His journal baldly recounts his bafflement that this is meant to be great literature.

An effete young aristocrat who has long had designs on her starts a long preamble that suggests he is working up to a proposal of marriage. When she implies that she is receptive and begs him to come to the point, he asks not for her hand but for a loan.

Irate villagers accuse her of being the vampire they hold responsible for deaths of their fellow inhabitants, but when the Russian (also in love with her) shows them a home movie in which she expires orgasmically under the fangs of an evil Oriental, several are convinced that she must therefore be innocent and that the malefactor is Chinese.

I should add that satire is ladled out over both proletarians and capitalists, the former being merely dim but the latter definitely nasty. And the pleasant soundtrack is probably an ironic commentary on what is being shown.