“The Addiction”, an acrobatic marriage between vampire film and concept essay

The 1990s were a prosperous decade for New York director Abel Ferrara, child of the Bronx and hothead, who then followed, under substance and in a state of grace, a series of decisive films – Bad lieutenant (1992), Our funeral (1996), The Blackout (1997), New Rose Hotel (1998) -, capturing a certain state of the city (New York, that is to say the world) and images on the breach of the ending century.

Halfway through this faultless, a more secret film, The Addiction (1995), a scathing and sepulchral nightmare, has passed almost without a trace, except in the memory of a few aficionados. Twenty-six years later, Carlotta offers its first edition (DVD or Blu-ray) to this black work, risking an acrobatic marriage between vampire film and concept essay.

Kathleen (Lili Taylor), philosophy student, widens her eyes with fear in front of the pangs of the XXe century and vogue, tottering, between the circles of the university intelligentsia and the wild pulsation of the street where it lives, crossroads of an underworld fauna, where the scents of grass and hip-hop float. It is there that one evening a stranger leads her to the shelter of an alley and bites her on the neck, inoculating her at the same time with her secret and her torment. No longer remains for Kathleen, at first groggy, then twisted with pain, to explore this evil which gnaws at her and takes the form of lack: an unfathomable thirst for blood which pushes her, in turn, to bite, to fill her veins of blood other than his own.

Path of damnation

Sensuality, detachment, dark glasses, languid poses recompose it. But all thirst is also thirst for knowledge, and Kathleen’s dependence is nonetheless an experience in its own right, an empirical approach that nourishes her doctoral thesis. And, like any path of damnation, it is not excluded that his will lead to grace.

The film spins the metaphor of vampirism as drug addiction – also seen as a spiritual quest

The Addiction, Ferrara’s latest collaboration with his childhood friend and screenwriter Nicholas St. John, a tortured Catholic, thus spins the metaphor of vampirism as drug addiction. Blood becomes a drug that we inject ourselves (Kathleen taking it from the arm of a homeless person using a syringe), a substance that contaminates as well as illuminates, the metronome of a hallucinated urban existence, oscillating between the extremes of lack and satisfaction. A double-trigger metaphor, since drug addiction is also seen as a spiritual quest: a way to embrace Evil, to release its powers (intelligence and predation: it’s just like), to better recognize in oneself the accursed part of the humanity and, perhaps, absolve itself of it.

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