The revival of the Transylvanian count has a very strong personal subtext
November 10, 1992. Two years after the controversial chapter III of the “The Godfather” saga, Francis Ford Coppola returned to the US theaters with a film that was only apparently far from his poetics: “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, an adaptation – in intentions – so faithful to the original novel to make it obligatory for the first time to integrate the author’s name in the title. It was the latest in a very long series of films that since the silent era had capitalized on the fascinating figure of the undead with infinite variations on the theme, but relatively few attempts at staging the “pure” character: from the masterpieces ” Nosferatu the Vampire “(1922) by Murnau and” Dracula “(1931) by Tod Browning, passing through the two – excellent – films with the legendary Christopher Lee directed by Terrence Fisher for the London-based Hammer (” Dracula the vampire “, 1958 and “Dracula, the prince of darkness”, 1966) and for that – again with Lee, but mediocre – by Jess Franco (“Count Dracula”, 1969), up to the simultaneous “Nosferatu, the prince of the night” (Murnau remake signed Werner Herzog) and (underrated) “Dracula” by John Badham, both from 1979. Invited by the (later) protagonist Winona Ryder to consider the script that James Hart had written trying to return as much as possible of Stoker’s book (by then radically betrayed and tr formated, from the historical incipit in Constantinople in the fall of the fifteenth century to the Transylvanian epilogue), Coppola was struck by the possibility of reshaping that material by supporting many of the obsessions already present in a more underground form in his previous cinema (and in his tormented private life: like the death of the twenty-two-year-old eldest son Giancarlo, which took place in 1986): and he embarked on the enterprise with a strength that he would rarely find later.
While Turkish Muslims threaten the Christian world in Europe, the Romanian knight Vlad Tepes (Gary Oldman), also known as Dracul, intervenes with bloody fury in defense of the Church. When he returns from the war he discovers that his beloved wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) has committed suicide after receiving the false news of his death in battle, he reacts however to the words of the priest who officiates the funeral, condemning her to damnation for the blasphemy of the act by denying the Faith and transforming into an immortal vampire. Five centuries later, in 1897, the English lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is sent to Transylvania to conclude a real estate transaction with an eccentric local count: and upon his arrival at Dracula’s home, he recognizes in a photo of Harker’s girlfriend , Mina Murray (again Winona Ryder), the reincarnation of the unforgettable Elisabeta. The count thus goes to London on the woman’s trail and easily succeeds in seducing her; but because he is forced to feed on the blood of Lucy (Sadie Frost), Mina’s best friend to maintain his youthful appearance, he draws the attention of Dr. Seward (Richard E. Grant) and Dutch vampire expert Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Dracula and Mina will find themselves inextricably linked by love although she, frightened by her attraction to the vampire, has meanwhile agreed to marry Harker; and after Dracula, hunted by her, will finally vampirize her before taking refuge again in Transylvania, she will be the turn of her young woman during the final battle with her hunters to break the eternal condemnation of the vampire.
Immortality as a necessary utopia not to suffer the pain of the premature loss of the dearest affections: the sense of Coppola’s Dracula is all here and in the folds of a cinema that desperately tries to crystallize the very act of its becoming the means by which to exorcise the pain of surviving (as also confirmed by the director’s poignant next work, Jack, 1995). However, the megafilm of the Detroit master is also much more. A reflection on the “greed for blood [che] it becomes greed for images: as if to say that, if at the end of the nineteenth century the vampire was Dracula, at the end of the twentieth century the real vampire is those who make films. And who looks at it ”(P. Mereghetti): and, not surprisingly, one of the very few freedoms that the film allows itself is in fact that of post-dating events of little more than five years to allow Vlad to take Mina to the cinema. But also a multi-faceted search for almost Shelleyana romantic lyricism made explicit above all in the construction of dialogues, chiseled with unforgettable, reckless, reiterated and consciously out of date poetic glimpses (“Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? The luckiest man to walk on this earth is the one who finds true love. “;” I crossed the oceans of time to find you. “).
The rest, the images and sounds do. Pure, powerful and highly worked the former (Michael Ballhaus’s “thermal” photography obviously imbued with every shade of red but also softened by dark brushstrokes), with digital used sparingly as a bridge with which to recreate the wonders of “tricks” in the present ”Of early cinema; and with the narrative scansion punctuated by all the transition effects of silent cinema (such as iris closures or fades from black). Dissonant as befits the soundtracks of the master Wojciech Kilar the seconds (with pieces in which the “demonic” voice of the great American performer Diamanda Galás is highlighted) and a design of the noise column of which no domestic vision will ever be able to restore the layering. And a bold cast: Oldman, who on paper did not seem to be able to embody the myth, is as unforgettable as his associates Ryder, Hopkins and Reeves, used by emphasizing in contrast the abysmal difference of their respective “methods”. Three Oscars: to the visionary costumes of the Japanese Eiko Ishioka, to the makeup of the expert Greg Cannom, to the sound editing. A masterpiece that after thirty years still remains equally suspended between its purely spectacular usability as an anti-blockbuster and the elusiveness of its wild and obsolete romanticism.
November 10, 2022 (change November 11, 2022 | 10:17)
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