The reappropriation of the Dracula myth by Romanian cinema

LocarnoWhy has Romania, the country where the Dracula myth originated, not spawned any vampire films? This seems to be the thought driving the debate. Dracula, the new film by Radu Jude, responsible for essential titles such as An Unfortunate Nail or Crazy Porn and Don't expect too much from the end of the world. But, far from proposing a new adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel or a story more in line with the character's historical basis, Jude pushes for a deconstruction of the commercial appropriations (vampirizations?) of Dracula and vindicates vampire tales with a local stamp in a film that is at the same time many films made from traditions. This three-hour feature includes a popular fable about a tree that grows penises; a tragic love story between rural workers in communist Romania; a revisiting of the figure of Dr. Aslan, the first medical star in the fight against aging who attracted celebrities from all over the world to her Romanian clinic; ironic reinterpretations of the Nosferatu by FW Murnau and by Film by Samuel Beckett; an erotic vampire cabaret for tourists in the heart of Transylvania; and a science fiction story about a workers' revolt, among others. The film is structured as a play. Frankenstein built from diverse stories, served up by a screenwriter who asks an artificial intelligence program to generate different narratives surrounding the famous vampire.

Few directors read the present times as well as Radu Jude, who this time has decided to incorporate generative AI as a theme and at the same time as a creative tool in his film. Apart from the interpretation of artificial intelligence as a voracious predator of other people's creativity and research, Dracula It integrates constant fantasy images emerging from the AI from the different scenarios proposed, kitsch and deformed splashes that contrast with the aesthetic proposal of the film, voluntarily situated on the side of low-budget cinema, poor images, unstylized Z series, old-school television productions and theater. If we talk about vampire films, the Dracula Jude aligns himself with Ed Wood and Jess Franco, and distances himself from the visions of Francis Ford Coppola and series for young audiences.

The film's epilogue, starring a garbage collector who despises both a pompous intellectual and his own daughter, who now embodies a new social class, seems to make explicit this desire to side with popular culture traditionally scorned by the elites, and also by contemporary hegemonic styles. This explicit distancing from good taste on Jude's part is also evident in his cultivation of lewd eroticism and vulgarity. In this film, as in no other, the Romanian connects in part with the Trilogy of Life Pier Paolo Pasolini's exaltation of a popular and shameless culture, without intellectual or romantic filters. The fruit of the brilliant and hyperactive mind of one of the most stimulating directors of our time, Dracula It also sometimes feels closer to his more experimental pieces than to his best-known titles.

A high-level competition

He Dracula by Radu Jude shares the race for the Golden Leopard with other very strong titles. Like the wonderful Phantoms of July (Sehnsucht in sangerhausen) by Julian Radlmaier, a Marxist filmmaker who reflects on the survival of romanticism in today's Germany, marked by precariousness and hate speech, in a delightful film that embraces the legacy of Éric Rohmer's summer tales. Or the essential With Hasan in Gaza, the new proposal of Kamal Aljafari, based on archive material from 2001, which allows us to enter an almost spectral journey through the most everyday and hidden Gaza of the early 20th century, a country that strives to not disappear from the images either.