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Nosferatu...Angel of the Final Hour -
A gurney rolls in centerstage and up swings Murnau, suddenly conscious before his moment of death from a car accident. What follows is the imagined dream life of Murnau, mixing memory with imagination, conjuring demons both envisioned and real. We enter the Café Fini to meet Murnau's motley band of eccentrics: the busty poetess Else Lasker-Schuler (played lewdly and brilliantly by Christine Deaver); the captivating French owner/chanteuse (Patrice Lumumba Quinn), who serves as Murnau's muse; the gypsy Murnau consults for advice (K.B. Dulude); the cigar-smoking Hollywood producer William Fox (a fantastic rendering by Antony Sandoval), and several other handsome young bohemians who attract Murnau's eye. Two ghosts emerge from this near-death reverie as presences which perpetually torment Murnau's mind: Nosferatu (Brian Frette), Murnau's vampire creation of his early years, and Hans (Peter Alton), the compassionate poet, the love of Murnau's life who was tragically killed in battle. These characters seem to manifest two competing views of life that haunt Murnau in his final hour. Is man, as Nosferatu wants us to believe, "nothing more than an animal" whose "basic instinct is to go for the jugular"? Or is he the kind, creative spirit we see in the young poet Hans? Is death a relief or a cruel blow? We come to recognize Murnau as a distressed, displaced soul, having left his native Germany, as did many Expressionist filmmakers, for a career in burgeoning Hollywood, a place which for these artists ultimately proved coffin-like in its loneliness and constriction, and ridiculously artificial in its demand for happy little films with happy little endings. After Murnau's actual death, much of his work was subsequently buried along with him, leaving only half of his films intact. Yet what Zoo District's homage achieves so beautifully is a significant double work of resurrection and creation, in which present and past artists heartily inspire and inform one another, guided by the meticulous hand of director Jon Kellam, and a fine, collaborative script, tightened into a unified vision by writer Kaaren J. Luker.  More Reviews "..head-snapping, dead on timing...fascinating." LOS ANGELES TIMES "..astutely juxtaposes slapstick comedy with the darkest of human impulses.."LA WEEKLY |
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