Dracula

Radu Jude and f(r)iend

Sometimes an artist becomes so successful that they are written blank checks to pursue whatever folly fancies them. Griffith followed The Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, both a riposte to his critics and an expansion of an already overly epic vision. Spielberg followed the one two punch of Jaw and Close Encounters... with 1941, a film that reeks of Hollywood excess. Those who have seen Apocalypse Now Redux will know how close Coppola came to creating an unwatchable fiasco. In the publishing world, it seems that Stephen King and JK Rowling reached a point in their careers in which their popularity prevented helpful input from their editors. Radu Jude seemed to be reaching this point on his last film and has crossed the Rubicon of self-indulgence with Dracula. 

It is not that there aren't any interesting ideas in the film, Dracula is teeming with ideas. There are riffs on past representations of Dracula on film and in literature. There is much rumination on the traumas of Romanian history, Jude's primary preoccupation thus far. There are endless digressions in the post modern style.There is purposefully cheesy AI generated CGI. There is an unreliable narrator. There is a burlesque of vampiric cosplay. There is much lowbrow humor and more phalluses on display than in a locker room. Some of the ideas are good and some fall flat. I laughed more times than when I watched Spaceballs, but Mel Brooks knew enough to keep his farces succinct. Dracula runs almost three hours and never coheres. It is divided into fifteen parts and I would have jettisoned or severely pruned half of them.

If I found Dracula to be Jude's worst film, I still somewhat enjoyed it, but, then, I prefer 1941 to Close Encounters. Like 1941, Dracula has the virtue of an antic and lunatic vision despite its indulgent excess. Life seems to be imitating art in that a theme park called Dracula Land is opening in Romania in 2027. One thing that buoys me is that the player who gives the best performance in Dracula, Eszter Tompa, stars in Jude's upcoming film, Kontinental '25, which opens in the US on March 27th.