Tobias Seamon
Order of the Dragon
Order of the Dragon
L'ordre du Dragon
Starring Istvan Tabor, Janka Lenci, Georges Emmanuel, with Karim
Sharif
Directed by Frederick Roka
(in French, with English and Hungarian subtitles)
The timing of this foreign release could not be more audacious, or
strange. Who, in Europe or America, during the current barrage of wartime
news, wants to see an artsy French adaptation of a barbaric Hungarian
stage play about the real life Dracula, a sadistic, Ottoman-hating
Romanian warlord known as Vlad the Impaler? The premise alone is
suffocating, never mind that the movie was almost entirely filmed, in
French with a combined Franco-Hungarian production team, from the
proscenium of the magnificently restored Grand Opera House in Budapest. If
ever a movie was doomed for the basement archives of American film
schools, Order of the Dragon would seem to be it. Amazingly
however, the movie succeeds in ways Hollywood hasn't dared to attempt
since Apocalypse Now. The surreal savagery of the production is a
tour de force of divided loyalties, religious iconography, familial
politics, and betrayal of all in an anarchic, chaotic world. The Count,
either in his vampiric guise or in his historically vicious persona would
surely appreciate this version of his life and times.
The premise of Order of the Dragon is simple: a rising Romanian
chieftain named Vlad Dracul (meaning "son of the dragon") is battling the
encroaching Turkish armies with all his fury. Once a prisoner of the
Sultan, Vlad is caught betwixt and between his ostensibly Christian allies
and the overwhelming force of the Sultan's ever-expanding Muslim kingdom.
Dracul belongs to the Order of the Dragon, a sect of eastern European
royalty committed unto death to stopping the Sultan's plans for conquest.
The Order isn't as cohesive as one would expect, and the Hungarian king
has already murdered both Vlad's father and brother during his
imprisonment in Istanbul. Nevertheless, it is the Turks who take the blame
for the murders, as Dracul is incapable of accepting what his worm-ish
brethren did in the past. The opening act is a battlefield scene, while
the action in the second takes place at the Hungarian court, where Vlad is
supposedly happily married to a Magyar princess. The third, again taking
place on the wooded, corpse-strewn battlefield, plays out his disastrous
adherence to the Order's vowed purpose and eventual death. Grim fare from
beginning to end, but considering the script's origin, unsurprising.
Order was originally written for the stage in 1930 by an obscure
Hungarian playwright named Jan Banhegy. The play, with all its gore,
caught some attention from audiences as well as the security apparatus of
Budapest. The work was deemed acceptable however, as the strident
anti-Ottoman theme of the piece disguised the subterranean rebelliousness
of the play. His personality made up in equal parts of misery and conceit,
Banhegy toiled for years in complete anonymity, scorning both his family
business (his father was a tailor to minor figures in the Austro-Hungarian
bureaucracy) and his lack of success as a playwright. Poor at best with
the scissors and measure, Banhegy used Svejk-like methods to elude
combat during the first World War, much to his later shame. Eventually he
left the confines of his father's shop and began work as a street sweeper
in the Pest-side of the city. During this time he composed Order of the
Dragon. A student of the Soviet experiment, he felt betrayed by
Stalin's burgeoning powers while continuing to despise the Habsburg
bluebloods still nascent in mittel-Europe. Banhegy wrote the play in a
kind of red-faced fury, heaping corpses on the stage at night while
sweeping the slums of the city during the day. Like Hitler, his seething
dreams were corrupt with megalomania and bloodshed. Noticed by a few of
the literary figures of the time, the production was met with a combined
form of awe and contempt: after reading the script, Mikhail Bulgakov
pronounced the play, "ludicrous, horrific, unviewable, and true" while
Isaac Babel sneered, "It is the nightmare of history, and nothing more."
The production ran for 6 months and earned Banhegy a bit of financial
breathing space, but his next play was a disaster. Entitled "The Blue
Ants" the work was an anarchic attack on the status quo, and the play was
closed by the polizei on opening night. Professionally ruined, Banhegy
himself was dead of pneumonia and drink within two years.
If ever there was a director suited to revive Order of the Dragon,
Frederick Roka would be it. The son of a Jewish Hungarian publisher and a
French writer of travelogues, Roka's family barely escaped the Anschluss
of 1936, departing on one of the last trains from Vienna before Hitler's
goons took over. Roka, only five at the time, remembered the experience
vividly, and it has tinged all of his movies, from underrated surrealist
piece Bulls of Limoges to his sexual farce The Clockwatcher's
Daughter. His actors are always on the move, either too early or too
late for their destinations, while seemingly being followed by unstoppable
forces. Whether the forces are lust or time or a combination of both, Roka
has certainly made it clear either one gets out of the way (impossible) or
is overwhelmed (unlivable.)
While Roka's choice for a comeback vehicle (he hadn't made a movie in
over 15 years) could be questioned, neither his casting nor his cinematic
skills should be. Istvan Tabor, a kind of Hungarian Christopher Lee, has
been haunting European horror films for decades, and the combination of
his immense height, gaunt features, and corkscrew eyes is a perfect fit
for the twisted and tortured Dracul. The Impaler's love interest is played
by Janka Lenci, fresh from her triumphant turn as Regan in a Prague
revival of Lear. The luminescent, blond bloodlust of Lenci's Regan
is toned down but still present in Order, as she's alternately
aroused then dismayed by Dracul's combined sadism and ideals. Lenci's
Shakespearean experience is more than evident, as without ever mentioning
a dagger or murder, she is the soul of Missus MacBeth. In her
dragon-embossed crimson skirts, plunging neckline, and
impressively-muscled shoulders, Lenci is far more vampirical than Dracul
ever appears to be, and it will only be a matter of time before Janka
Lenci is sending American moviegoers (and actresses) into fits when her
mere force of presence upstages anyone in the vicinity.
Despite such formidable personnel, the director somehow then manages to
contain them within both the stage and the lens, never quite allowing
Banhegy's megalomaniacal script to undermine Roka's own intentions for
Order of the Dragon. For one, all of the action was filmed live on an
actual stage, before an actual audience, in the beautiful expanse of the
gilded Grand Opera House of Budapest. Instead of allotting his budget
towards the more current cinematic methods, Roka staged Order using
one of the most demonically impressive sets ever raised. The curtain opens
on a scene of utter destruction and personal triumph for Dracul, as he
stands, black armored and bloody, atop a mound of Turkic corpses. Spears,
serving as a prequel for the monstrous third act impalings, are embedded
in the ashen set at all angles, in a kind of cage around the warlord. The
backdrop is immense, seeming to stretch backwards for hundreds of leagues,
like a magnification of one of Breughel's more demented landscapes. The
hills themselves writhe with fires and battle, as flickering torches
alternately flare and die down behind the scrim. The landscape is as
war-tormented as the actors, and the sheer expanse of the set is literally
and audibly breath-taking: the audience can be heard gasping and gaping at
the moment the curtain lifts. The movie audience, however, has already
seen (suffered?) through their own opening shot, as a camera above the
stage has zoomed ferociously down on the action to the accompaniment of a
screaming horse. It is like being at the tip of a falling bomb, to emerge
like the actual audience upon a scene of utter carnage. Even as the actual
audience gasps, the shot seems to come back out of the cage of spears,
next to the victorious yet monstrous Dracul. The whole thing is too much-
too much landscape, too much sound and desolation, too many corpses and
spears and war, and in the center, too much Tabor as the leering, leery,
blood soaked Dracul. Simply put, it's one of the most unpleasantly
impressive opening's I've ever watched.
From there the tragedy, if it can be called that considering the
protagonist, plays out on the proscenium. Dracul confers with lieutenants,
grouses about losses, kicks heads around, kills one underling for
delivering bad news, and generally curses the world in general. Roka has
cut the admittedly weak script down to shreds, and thereby added a kind of
stream-of-conscious poetry to the dialogue. Only the most crucial lines
have remained, and recited in a deliberately stiff manner by Tabor,
Banhegy's previously awkward phrasings become sublime with power,
resignation, and yes, madness. The contrived, at times un-cohesive
sentences, only emphasizes Dracul's war-weariness and exhaustion with the
world he lives and battles with all the time. The Count knows he will
never have the numbers to effectively stop the Sultan, but he is
determined to try. He has sworn to do so. Along the way, he is in full
understanding that his own successes will only alienate his
already-untrustworthy Christian allies, the same ones who murdered his
family and fear him as a rival. Also, through brief moments of memory of
his childhood captivity to the Sultan, he remembers the foreign yet
despicable ways of the Sultan's court. He takes time to give a litany of
the miracles of the Sultan's house, then punctuates the list with memories
of the tortures he suffered in the dungeons when they occasionally
attempted to convert him. By the completion of the first act, Dracul is
ready to forsake war for a marriage offer in the Hungarian royal house,
and declaring essentially that he will go into retirement, Dracul actually
looks up directly into the high camera and announces his peaceful
intentions to the movie audience, God himself, or Roka's bomb-shell lens,
you choose which.
In the second act, Lenci steals the show as Dracul's young and
beautiful wife. The act opens, this time not as a bomb, but as a view from
the auditorium. The camera moves from a close-up of the gilded cherubim on
the Opera House's ceiling down to the medieval chamber where Dracul, his
Princess bride, her duplicitous father and an envoy from the Sultan plot,
talk, and otherwise grow bored with themselves. Tapestry-covered walls are
erected in front of the battle-scene backdrop, though the fires and smoke
can still be seen through one small window above the Count's chair. The
King, in a typically serpentine portrayal by Georges Emmanuel, is neither
quite barbarian warlord, nor sophisticate politico, while the Muslim envoy
is both. It's obvious why Turks will be victorious in their future, and
brutally inhumane, conquest of eastern Europe. The King lacks Dracul's
manic adherence to the ideals of the Order, while Dracul has none of the
King's survivalist wiles. Between the two, and playing both off each
other, is the Princess, who doesn't even bother to hide the obviously
sexual feelings she has for her father. This is perhaps why she wants the
King killed as well, and she plays on all of Dracul's ambitions and
grudges, urging him to go back into the field of battle, to make his own
great kingdom and ostensibly, return to slaughter her relations.
Surprising or not, it is the Sultans' envoy who warns Dracul of the futile
stupidity of such plans, saying only to the furious yet confused war
chief, "You have a son, I see him playing, there in the court below. He
could grow up strong here." Dracul, true to form, ignores the good advice
and hits the road. Lenci's smoldering kiss and vial of blood from her own
wrist are Dracul's goodbye to the supposedly-civilized world. The act ends
with the camera slowly hazing over in red, panning with a touch of regret
back to the cherubim above. Roka knows exactly what Dracul has left
behind, for better or for worse.
The final act is pure Grand Guignol, and mercifully short. The opening
shot is floor-level, gazing up into the open eyes of a dead Turk. There is
a veritable forest of the dead within the forest on stage, as a few trees
have been moved in front of the battlefield backdrop. Amidst the carnage
again is Dracul, black-armored and insane, dining at a table in the center
of the clearing. He is covered in blood, but this time the blood is his
own, and his lieutenants are far fewer. He delights in death, but not in
victory anymore. When the dying moan from their spears, he puts a hand to
the ear and grins. He is drunk, and when the wine runs out, he drinks from
the slit throat of a yet another hapless underling. The vampire legend is
born even as a messenger announces that the Hungarian King has refused to
send more troops to Dracul's assistance. Here, at the conclusion, Roka's
influence is at his best, turning Banhegy's original, maudlin final speech
inside out. Dracul, at his most vile, is also at his most sorrowful.
Knowing the Sultan will enslave all he can reach, Dracul both mourns and
curses the Order of the Dragon. Despising their self-interest, he also
praises them, and himself, for their courage in the face of tyranny. The
speech is relentlessly self-conflicting, and utterly touching, as the
demonic Vlad the Impaler declares the whole world to be an Order of the
Dragon, full of flames and traitors, hate and war, gold-hoarders, bastards
and fanatics, some of whom, like himself, want mostly just to be free,
free of history, family, and the all-consuming obligation of an oath taken
many years before as a young man held captive in the dungeons of the
Sultan. Like the first act, the speech is directed to the lens above. Roka
knows when the sound of clapping is inappropriate, and in the stillness
between curtain and applause, the shot goes black and silent, and the
credits roll.
Unfortunately, L'ordre du Dragon is an achievement few will ever
experience. The centrifugal depravity of the action, as well as the
foreign direction, will confine Order to short runs in dingy art
houses, and there is no American release date set. Perhaps though, in a
few years, as audiences hopefully become more and more disenfranchised
with the artless pabulum spewed from Hollywood, they will venture into the
NYU basement to find a copy of Order. Americans then will be
shocked, disgusted, and dazzled. While the film adheres to the same order
that Dracul raves against at the last, the order is necessary to make
Roka's blood-drenched and deliberately over-sized vision of history,
ideals, ambition, and cultural conflict available, if not palatable, for
digestion. It is a testament to Roka's hopes for the film that he needed
both the camera and the proscenium to encapsulate his anti-war designs.
Considering the current global circumstances, so savagely ludicrous with a
future so unviewable, that alone makes this film such a feat.
Tobias Seamon’s fiction and poetry have appeared at 3rd Bed, The
Absinthe Review, The Adirondack Review, Cutbank, McSweeney's, The Melic
Review, The Paumanok Review, and Poor Mojo's Almanck, with work
forthcoming at The Blue Moon Review, Eyeshot, and the Salt River
Review. |