Domnisoara Christina – review

Director: Viorel Sergovici

Release date: 1992

Contains spoilers

A little background, if I may, of how I came to know this film existed. On occasion I am known to attend the excellent online lectures arranged by Romancing the Gothic - favouring, of course, the vampire related. I spotted one by Maria Cohut entitled Revenants as Abject Feminine in Romanian Gothic Horror: Mircea Eliade’s ‘Miss Christina’ (1936). The word revenant got me… then as I looked into the book I noted it used the term strigoï. More excited now I looked to track the book and discovered that there were two Romanian films based on it. This being the first and so I managed to track it down and watch this the day before the lecture. Note this is not easily come by, it is a VHS quality rip from Romanian TV and, I suspect, fan-subbed. There was also a 2013 version that I will also look at.

Christina murdered

So Eliade’s story surrounded strigoï and, from within the lecture I ascertained that in his non-fiction work he recognised both the strigoï vii as living witch-like persons and strigoï mort as more vampiric and fluctuating from spectral to corporeal. This film, I understand, follows the book pretty darn closely. It starts with Miss Christina (which is the English title) the sound of a crack of gunfire and she falls dead. This places the event in the historical peasant’s revolt of 1907. Later, however, we get to hear that Christina was deemed as wicked anyway (beyond being a landowner). The film shows us a portrait of her.

Adrian Pintea as Egor

Moving to the 1930s and the painter Egor Paschievici (Adrian Pintea) has visited Sanda (Raluca Penu), with whom he has a romantic entanglement. As they walk through the hall of her family house he tries to pull her to him but she pulls away and says they have a new guest. They enter the dinning room and her mother, Mrs Moscu (Irina Petrescu), introduces Professor Nazarie (Dragos Pîslaru). They sit to eat but Sanda’s younger sister, Simina (Medeea Marinescu), insists she have the chair near her mother to which the Professor acquiesces. A note about Simina, the dialogue referring to her describes her as young – indeed in the novel she is nine – but Medeea Marinescu was eighteen and the character looks teen. I suspect this is because of sexual connotations later.

the portrait

One thing of note is Mrs Moscu eating obsessively, shovelling fork after fork of food into her mouth. Egor has also noted that she seems to lose strength as the sun sets, sometimes falling into lethargy. The next day Simina reports having dreamt about Aunt Christina – Mrs Moscu’s older sister – and the men are taken to a locked room that contains the portrait of Christina. Egor suggests he would like to paint it in his own style and Sanda tells him that it is rare that her mother lets anyone in the room. The Professor has heard stories about Christina being the bailiff’s mistress and forcing him to thrash peasants for her pleasure. During the uprising, it is said that she invited peasant men two at a time into her room and allowed them to rape her (a note from Maria Cohut’s lecture is that this paints her as the abject feminine, that rape and consent are mutually exclusive, and that the tale is told from a male perspective) and the bailiff shot her out of jealousy. Children in the village, he suggests, still fear her.

Simina and Nazarie

As the story progresses Egor, having had warning dreams at first, starts seeing Miss Christina in his dreams as she attempts to seduce him. Sanda becomes deathly ill – and is said to have anaemia by the doctor (George Constantin) who is called for. Though we don’t see it, Sanda seems to be being fed upon by Christina, whose powers grow and who seems to become more corporeal. Equally Simina starts acting in a way inappropriate for a child (notwithstanding the age she presents in the film), knowing things about Christina, cleaning her Aunt’s prized carriage, acting sexually dominant to Egor at a point and a cut on his lip may have occurred when she kisses him. This can be read two ways, that she is being possessed at times by her aunt or, as posited by Maria Cohut, that she is actually strigoï vii. The mother seems to have a sympathetic connection to Christina, with her prized portrait and obsessive eating habits and perhaps lending her strength to the strigoï mort at night. It is interesting that in the climax, when villagers reach the house, her first reaction is to say, “You’ve come for land” referencing the 1907 revolt again.

Sanda weakens

The way to deal with a strigoï in this is to push a rod of iron through the heart (in the grave) but the film also connects the portrait in to the ending – with portraits being a firm favourite within the Gothic. I enjoyed this but it is rather languid in its pace, the slow march rather than a rush of thrills and it also aims more for the uncanny than it does horror. The world feels off kilter. It is an interesting take on the feminine; it is a household of females, the negative stories about Christina are delivered by men and the three women of the household could be fit into the maiden (Simina), mother (Sanda – though she is not a mother she is the object of Egor’s sexual desire) and crone (Mrs Moscu), with Miss Christina a unifying force. One thing that did strike me was a feel of la Morte Amoureuse - though Clarimonde only demanded a drop of blood from her lover, and Christina seemed to be sucking the life out of Sanda as she pursued Egor. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.