Cinema, as Iván Zulueta made clear in Arrebato, is an exercise for night owls, creatures of the night, addicts to the ecstasy of emptiness, vampires. Cinema, seen (or bitten) from any perspective, is itself the vampiric art of illusion, deception, and eternity. Movie stars do not age, and the cameras that capture the artifice of filmed life never reflect in mirrors. The bite - a childish metonymy of intercourse - with which the bloodsucker seizes the will of its victim possesses the same power as the screen that, with its hypnotic ability, captivates the viewer. And perhaps that is why it always lurks there as a threat and warning, as nostalgia and dream. Not long ago, it was Robert Eggers who recreated and reinvented, all at once, Murnau's first Nosferatu, and now it is Luc Besson who, from a supposedly new perspective, insists on the most elegant, postmodern, refined, and decadent of figures.
What the always excessive Besson tells us is, as the subtitle says, a love story. But in its most genuine sense. For too long, the being canonized by Bram Stoker has been recreated as the most fiercely selfish of all. The vampire, as it has been incorporated into our bloodstream, is on the side of modern individuality and its liberating impulses; on the side of amour fou against the hypocrisy and deception of religions. Count Dracula, we speak of him, is not only a decadent phallocrat who inhabits a castle and oppresses women and servants alike, but also the embodiment of libertarian postmodernity, always refined, cultured, and exquisite. But he is also the eternal adolescent, neither alive nor dead, neither young nor old, unable to control his desires which are also his hormones. And so, as free and individual, he is in any of his cinematic incarnations until the arrival of, indeed, Caleb Landry Jones, chosen by the French director.
Now our hero is simply a hero in love willing to do anything to recover what - no evidence is needed - is the only thing worth giving life and even death for, understood not as a renunciation of the former but as its ultimate expression. We are talking, of course, about love. This is the journey of this new Dracula that revisits each of the usual chapters and gives them a new meaning. The fierce and irrevocable narcissistic egotist is suddenly seen as a slave not to himself and his desires but to the will of being through the loved one. Or not being. "Freedom I do not know except the freedom of being a prisoner in someone/ whose name I cannot hear without shivering," as the poet would say. And, truth be told, just for this, the movie is safe.
Besson applies his always excessive way of seeing and living cinema, as tragic and noisy as it is spectacular and showy, to his particular discovery, and there he stays to live. The film lives in a constant excitement full of discoveries (few ideas as brilliant as putting Dracula in a fair's haunted house) as it is happy in each of its mistakes (the animated gargoyles are unbelievable), as comical every time Christoph Waltz's Van Helsing enters the scene, overacted from the first to the last shot. Uneven, feverish, erratic, capricious, inexplicable, and always surprisingly entertaining, that's Besson's Dracula.
Cinema is a vampiric art, and Luc Besson fills it with pure (and very crazy) blood.
Director: Luc Besson. Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu Sidel, Christoph Waltz. Duration: 129 minutes. Nationality: France.