Radu Jude puts a stake through diabolical politics.
Our era’s most politically alert filmmaker, Radu Jude of Romania, is known for wild, incisive parodies about the debased habits of societies almost recovering from totalitarianism; he satirizes the folklore of public desperation. Jude’s latest vaudeville, Dracula, runs 170 minutes to catch up with the latest disarray and panic. Approaching the Dracula legend differently than Guillermo del Toro does in his juvenile horror film Frankenstein, it explores the vampire legend as part of Romania’s history, cleverly relating it to Millennial pessimism. It’s a horror comedy about rising dread as political actors worldwide exhibit mankind’s most diabolical behavior.
In keeping with Jude’s hilarious I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, there’s undeniable brilliance throughout the nearly three hours. But Dracula is also his most infuriating and least disciplined film, because he doesn’t understand global disaster so much as he is simply, brazenly, cynical.
Jude’s parody starts with a jolt: assorted AI iterations of the Dracula legend — garish, cartoonish faces declaring “I am Vlad the Impaler! You can suck—!” They introduce a seedy porn travesty performed by a cabaret troupe whose members (Ana Dumitrascu, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia) improvise new Dracula tales as a way to contend with their abiding political and spiritual unease. Being trapped in the history of a superstitious country brings out their worst traits. Even without the long-dead dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu to blame for inherited vices, they invent a series of narrative digressions: “Eutorpia,” “Nosferatu,” “Hollywood,” “The Homecoming,” “The Fangs of the Vampire,” “Das Kapital,” “The Tale of All Tales,” “Dracula TikTok” — Jude enumerates each one, then eventually loses count.
Jude’s encyclopedic recall mixes history and modernity, documentary with both theatricality and cinema. A young tech-savvy director (Adonis Tanta) narrates, invoking Beckett, Murnau, Dreyer. But essentially, Jude follows Jean-Luc Godard’s example of experimental essay as exemplified by Godard’s ingenious Les Carabiniers (1964), a reinvented war movie that deconstructed neorealism while also being a pastiche of Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night.
Using outré provocation, Jude overindulges in pornography; his cinematic graffiti flashes profanity and genitalia like graffiti to match AI’s vulgar surrealism. It falls short of the memorable spoils-of-war postcard semiotics tour de force in Les Carabiniers. Instead, there’s a rude cartography of Romanian villages: Clitty, Cockatoo, Cuntsville, Ballsack. Where Godard’s sequence was astonishing, Jude’s is merely puerile. (Romania’s epithet for the male organ is “coin of the realm.”)
Dracula being both a traditional and pop culture totem lets Jude play out a theory of “collective hallucination.” Piling on cultural and political references, he quips, “Duchamp is our lawyer for fair use of Coppola,” invoking the era of intellectual property. Lars Von Trier’s horror-comedy The House That Jack Built was similarly self-indulgent, but Jude includes so many wacky global political references that the satire gets derailed.
His tally of international offenses — “Rising inequality, October 7th, Gaza massacres, Trump’s regime techno-fascism” — is a leftist wish list, ignoring Biden-era perfidies. Instead of this cheap shot probably derived from The Guardian or The Economist, Jude might have scored a hit by tying his conceit to the bloodsucking politicians who are our contemporary Draculas — Biden, Mayorkas, the Seditious Six, Jean-Pierre, Raskin, Schiff, etc. Giving in to routine TDS is unworthy of Jude’s artistry, even though he jokes “Let’s do it like Murder on the Orient Express; everybody gets a go,” while impaling a Dracula effigy.
A trope this dishonest makes you distrust Jude’s judgment. His dirty, Foucauldian derivations on Romanian folk humor need the genius of Godard’s brevity. Only in the anecdote of dorky truck driver Duminico (Nicodim Ungureanu) and simple, pretty village girl Adina (Alexandra Harapu) falling in love (against romantic nightmares they find “a place where all is unreal and repairable”) does Jude create a moral tale as visually and emotionally evocative as a horror film.
In the finale, a “street sweeper” anecdote suggested by poet Ion Creanga about a garbage man whose profession embarrasses his school-age daughter, Jude offers “a newslice of life.” It pinpoints the class differences that persist in post-totalitarian culture. The suggestion that revolution against despots actually damages citizens is a darker reality than any Dracula tale. As the schoolgirl recites a patriotic poem — “Longings you cannot console / For a distant happiness within / For what was not but could have been / For what was and now is forever gone” — Jude assesses his nation’s regret. This may convey Jude’s personal feelings, yet his final fade-out gimmick feels sentimental and rote. By then, he has worn down the audience he meant to entertain and enlighten.
