‘Dracula’: Luc Besson Still Thinks We Haven’t Seen Coppola’s Version | Cinema: previews and reviews

After at least thirty film adaptations of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s immortal novel, and only 11 months later Nosferatu, After Robert Eggers’ contribution to the vampire universe – supported by the most artistic of all, FW Murnau’s one of the same name – there are still filmmakers who have things to imagine, visualize and say about one of the great figures of popular culture.

Luc Besson came up with the following. Establishing not only a parallel but a concreteness between the fictional role of Dracula and the real character of Vlad the Impaler, 15th century prince of Wallachia, and inspiration for Stoker’s book, although in the novel there is only a brief reference in chapter 18: Professor Van Helsing refers to the count as a Wallachian “voivode” who earned his name fighting against the Turks. A long prologue of almost half an hour develops in which Vlad Dracul’s love for his wife Elisabeta, and the romantic and non-terrifying modulation, appear as tonal and narrative dominants. It recounts his struggle against the Ottomans, as well as the death of his beloved wife and the subsequent denial of God in a sacred space and before a representative of the Church. Being cursed with immortality, living through the ages waiting to find it again, and introducing the phrase “I’ve crossed oceans” to describe the feeling. It presents the idea that Mina, wife of Jonathan, the man who goes to Dracula’s villa, is the reincarnation of Elisabeta.

The problem is that all these contributions arrive 33 years late. The years that have passed since the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula The version of the novel by Francis Ford Coppola, in which everyone has already appeared, then truly new, and now vilely plundered by Besson, who was also not satisfied with the above.

The makeup and hairstyle in this part of the story of the main character – played by Caleb Landry Jones with an exacerbated and suffering tone, similar to that of Gary Oldman in that part – and even some passages of Danny Elfman’s soundtrack, are so miserably indebted to those created for Coppola’s film by his own artistic team (and not taken from the texts of Stoker’s novel), and by the musician Woyciech Kilar, that the French filmmaker’s operation borders on the limit of impudence.

Naturally Besson, who is also nobody, composes images with a certain visual power throughout his history. That the battle against the Turks is filmed and staged spectacularly, according to Orson Welles’ statements on staging and editing for It rings at midnight. And that there are some real contributions, even if not very relevant, such as the fusion of the characters of the mad Renfield and Lucy (here María), the friend of Harker’s wife, and the change of Coppola’s setting in Victorian London with another in the Paris of the beautiful époque

However, the veteran director is gorgeous Kamikaze 1999 (The Last Fight), his debut in 1983, The big blue (1988), The Professional (Leon) (1994) and the recent one Dogman (2023), after an initial third of attacks and robberies against Coppola, and a slightly more authentic second segment, he succumbs with a crazy final stretch. Thus, his strange sense of humor (the suicides, the effect of his perfume on women…) is completed with a decisive fight against Christoph Waltz’s Van Helsing and his henchmen, in which his army of living gargoyles is composed in CGI (computer-created images) and the disastrous staging of the battle, the only thing they refer to is a bad Marvel superhero movie.