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It is another branch of the family
As I soon as I discovered that Tanith Lee's "Nunc Dimittis" (1983) had been adapted for an episode of Showtime's The Hunger (1997–2000), I resolved to watch it in memory of David Warner and braced myself for the possibility that it might not be very good. Of all of Lee's changes on vampirism which range from several far futures to a piano, this particularly soft-spoken one did not seem to lend itself automatically to the series remit of erotic horror. As it turns out, my major complaint about "Nunc Dimittis" (1999) as adapted by Gerald Wexler and directed by Russell Mulcahy is that it deserved to run longer. The half-hour format is sufficient to fit the bones of the story and even to sketch some of its somber and delicate flesh, but where vampires are concerned, it's the blood that really counts.
Like the original novelette, the plot of the episode is an elegiac three-hander between an aged and immortal vampire, her long-lived and dying servant, and the beautiful hustler whom he seeks out as his successor, his last gift of service to the mistress with whom his death and his life have been intimately, symbiotically intertwined. It's as small-scale and momentous as any human transition; the compression of the runtime makes it feel more eventful than its contemplative source material in which even the occasional incursion of violence arrives without surprise, but transferring the action from an implicit London to an apparent Montreal does nothing to interfere with the atmosphere of superficially, not necessarily irreconcilable contrasts of character and time. Much of the effect depends on the triangulation of the principals, not just the parallels between the once and future servants, but between the two of them and the vampire, all hunters once in their own ways. The emotional weight rests with the character of Vasyelu Gorin, called by one person in all his more than ordinarily long and devoted life by the diminutive of Vassu, and as I had hoped and expected Warner knocks him out of the park.
"When he was your age," muses Marina Orsini's Princess Darejan Draculas to the rough-trade thief and junkie played by Jacob Tierney who calls himself—not the dragon, but its dust-bellied cousin—Snake, "he was the same as you." It is difficult to credit at first, watching this tall, controlled man go about his duties with long-polished, never rote care. Taxonomically, it would not be inaccurate to describe him as the Princess' Renfield, but the script plays as gently with the tropes of his nature as with our expectations of his mistress in whose kitchen hang strings of innocuous garlic and on whose breast rests a jeweled antique cross: when a moth flutters about the supper he is preparing for the Princess, he catches the insect deftly in his hands and then releases it to the night beyond the lace-curtained window. He pours wine for her, which she drinks without irony. When he descends from the candlelit cloister of her brownstone into the urban blight that has stranded them in the onrushing millennium, he makes an elegant anachronism in his fur-collared coat and the clothes of an older century, so weary and powerful with the weathered iron bones of his face and his still thick, still fairish hair that it is no stretch for the audience to imagine him as beautiful and feral as any of the neon-lit night-children who offer themselves for sale as he passes without interest, waiting to sense somewhere in the churn of music and bodies the same aura of a violent end which foretold his path to the Princess more than two centuries ago. He is deeply tender with her, their rapport compounded of affection, regret, and envy: she has grown old with him, but not to die of it, as he will. "Oh, Vassu," she breathes at the admission of his long-delayed mortality. "Are you glad?" The answer to his own question, "Have I been faithful to all we swore?" is the cup of her hand against his tear-tracked cheek. It is believable that she promises to endure without him, needing so little in her old age which gives her a curiously serpentine look of her own; it is believable that the prospect of her so reduced is what drives him not to abandon her with what remains of his failing time. Abroad in the modern streets, he is utterly unafraid of anything he might encounter and not arrogantly so. Snake rams him against the wall of an alley which seems to be one of the natural habitats of this restless, wolfish kid whom we met getting up off his knees, spitting out the last of his trick; jeers nervously when he can't find a wallet on his calmly waiting mark, "You keep your money in your sock?" The almost affectionate contempt with which the older man regards him is echt Lee, no matter that the exchange is an invention of the teleplay. "Yes," Vassu replies, as if it's a joke between them. "In my sock," before twisting the gun from his would-be mugger's hand and flinging him the width of the alley with no more effort than the smallest compression of a smile, the inexorable authority of the vampire himself. The same little, appraising amusement will greet the insolent theft of his cigarettes and their ornate case as he prepares to present Snake to the Princess, but it costs him something to answer afterward, "I saw something in you when he left. You were alive. There was a fire in your eyes I have not seen in over a hundred years." We saw her, too, blooming up like wings of blazing stained glass. From Vassu, we understand, she can no longer kindle so.
I am not enamored of the introduction of special effects into a narrative so carefully low-key that even the final rejuvenation of the Princess according to Lee may be nothing more than a trick of the light and of Vassu's heart, his last wish to see his mistress restored and safely in the keeping of another who will love her and serve her and some far-off final evening of his own entrust her in turn to the care of the next servant who will keep her young and hunting and dangerous in the world, but then the episode doesn't need the jolt any more than the squat of an abandoned swimming pool where Snake shoots up and sleeps needs to be full of industrial metal and screaming in ways that recall an '80's punk dystopia more than actual teen homelessness, although it works to intercut the squalor and uncertainty of his life with the quiet rituals of Vassu and Darejan Draculas at home. "The world is the way it always was," the old servant reminds her before venturing out into it, where he brought himself to an early grave with his own pointless crimes before the blood of the vampire redeemed him. "It is we who have changed." The ambiguous interweaving of the dreams and memories of the two men goes further than Lee, but strengthens the sense of the bond between them, mediated not only by their closeness to the vampire, but to death—when Snake is knifed in the squat which he sees suddenly as some Boschian bedlam, it is Vassu in the brownstone's clean kitchen who catches himself against the table with the pain. The novelette closes with the last living thought of Vassu, but the episode continues into a coda of the morning after, when Snake brings his first cup of wine to the Princess, the tentative, serious gesture of service showing how far he has altered already from the twitchy, transactional hustler just as her slight, wistful touch of his cheek signifies her acceptance of his importance to her and the recognition that he is not Vassu who gave them into one another's care and died as they sealed it with the customs of her branch of the family, neither forgotten nor interchangeably discarded. We might surmise as much from the original text; the adaptation makes sure we know it; it doesn't elaborate too far and it doesn't spoil the tone of the novelette which remains one of the gentlest vampire stories I know, certainly far more so than Lee's "Stained with Crimson" (The Book of the Damned, 1988) with which it shares the cyclical conceit of a vampire that can be handed on like an heirloom or an infection from one mortal to the next. I am not enamored of the makeup for the Princess, either, but I can at least appreciate its indication that whatever the vampires of this world may be, the answer was never human.
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, runs the canticle of the title, the peaceful dismissal of the faithful servant, secundum verbum tuum in pace. I have no idea what Lee thought of this translation of her words, but I was left wondering who in the '80's or '90's could have given it the 45-minute treatment that would have allowed it to breathe—it might be too much to hope that the CGI could have been entirely eschewed. It does so well with parts of her dialogue, I wish it had included more. I can't hold it fairly against Tierney that he is not as flawlessly leopardine as Lee's Snake, but he pulls off the shape-shifting of a callow street kid confronted with the supernatural, scoffing and drawn to it even without knowing that it could save his life and what he might in time come to refer to as his soul. I wasn't sure how much of Orsini's vampirism I believed until she kissed Vassu for the last time and it was not a human farewell. Warner's just magnificent. He feels like two hundred years. Both seasons of The Hunger are available on Freevee, but I was so shocked that the DVDs were in my local library system that I requested the relevant season at once. Had I watched any TV in college that wasn't communally viewed cassettes of British comedy, I could have seen the original airing effectively for my birthday. Since I was feverishly collecting any new or used Tanith Lee I happened onto at that time, I am sure it would have had an effect. Incidentally, I have seen David Bowie onscreen in the years since his death—including in Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983)—but it was still faintly strange to find his host character at the close of this episode contemplating his own granite-chiseled birth and death dates. "When the end of the day is near and you know that tomorrow will not come, will you have the grace to rest in peace?" This fire brought to you by my changed backers at Patreon.
Like the original novelette, the plot of the episode is an elegiac three-hander between an aged and immortal vampire, her long-lived and dying servant, and the beautiful hustler whom he seeks out as his successor, his last gift of service to the mistress with whom his death and his life have been intimately, symbiotically intertwined. It's as small-scale and momentous as any human transition; the compression of the runtime makes it feel more eventful than its contemplative source material in which even the occasional incursion of violence arrives without surprise, but transferring the action from an implicit London to an apparent Montreal does nothing to interfere with the atmosphere of superficially, not necessarily irreconcilable contrasts of character and time. Much of the effect depends on the triangulation of the principals, not just the parallels between the once and future servants, but between the two of them and the vampire, all hunters once in their own ways. The emotional weight rests with the character of Vasyelu Gorin, called by one person in all his more than ordinarily long and devoted life by the diminutive of Vassu, and as I had hoped and expected Warner knocks him out of the park.
"When he was your age," muses Marina Orsini's Princess Darejan Draculas to the rough-trade thief and junkie played by Jacob Tierney who calls himself—not the dragon, but its dust-bellied cousin—Snake, "he was the same as you." It is difficult to credit at first, watching this tall, controlled man go about his duties with long-polished, never rote care. Taxonomically, it would not be inaccurate to describe him as the Princess' Renfield, but the script plays as gently with the tropes of his nature as with our expectations of his mistress in whose kitchen hang strings of innocuous garlic and on whose breast rests a jeweled antique cross: when a moth flutters about the supper he is preparing for the Princess, he catches the insect deftly in his hands and then releases it to the night beyond the lace-curtained window. He pours wine for her, which she drinks without irony. When he descends from the candlelit cloister of her brownstone into the urban blight that has stranded them in the onrushing millennium, he makes an elegant anachronism in his fur-collared coat and the clothes of an older century, so weary and powerful with the weathered iron bones of his face and his still thick, still fairish hair that it is no stretch for the audience to imagine him as beautiful and feral as any of the neon-lit night-children who offer themselves for sale as he passes without interest, waiting to sense somewhere in the churn of music and bodies the same aura of a violent end which foretold his path to the Princess more than two centuries ago. He is deeply tender with her, their rapport compounded of affection, regret, and envy: she has grown old with him, but not to die of it, as he will. "Oh, Vassu," she breathes at the admission of his long-delayed mortality. "Are you glad?" The answer to his own question, "Have I been faithful to all we swore?" is the cup of her hand against his tear-tracked cheek. It is believable that she promises to endure without him, needing so little in her old age which gives her a curiously serpentine look of her own; it is believable that the prospect of her so reduced is what drives him not to abandon her with what remains of his failing time. Abroad in the modern streets, he is utterly unafraid of anything he might encounter and not arrogantly so. Snake rams him against the wall of an alley which seems to be one of the natural habitats of this restless, wolfish kid whom we met getting up off his knees, spitting out the last of his trick; jeers nervously when he can't find a wallet on his calmly waiting mark, "You keep your money in your sock?" The almost affectionate contempt with which the older man regards him is echt Lee, no matter that the exchange is an invention of the teleplay. "Yes," Vassu replies, as if it's a joke between them. "In my sock," before twisting the gun from his would-be mugger's hand and flinging him the width of the alley with no more effort than the smallest compression of a smile, the inexorable authority of the vampire himself. The same little, appraising amusement will greet the insolent theft of his cigarettes and their ornate case as he prepares to present Snake to the Princess, but it costs him something to answer afterward, "I saw something in you when he left. You were alive. There was a fire in your eyes I have not seen in over a hundred years." We saw her, too, blooming up like wings of blazing stained glass. From Vassu, we understand, she can no longer kindle so.
I am not enamored of the introduction of special effects into a narrative so carefully low-key that even the final rejuvenation of the Princess according to Lee may be nothing more than a trick of the light and of Vassu's heart, his last wish to see his mistress restored and safely in the keeping of another who will love her and serve her and some far-off final evening of his own entrust her in turn to the care of the next servant who will keep her young and hunting and dangerous in the world, but then the episode doesn't need the jolt any more than the squat of an abandoned swimming pool where Snake shoots up and sleeps needs to be full of industrial metal and screaming in ways that recall an '80's punk dystopia more than actual teen homelessness, although it works to intercut the squalor and uncertainty of his life with the quiet rituals of Vassu and Darejan Draculas at home. "The world is the way it always was," the old servant reminds her before venturing out into it, where he brought himself to an early grave with his own pointless crimes before the blood of the vampire redeemed him. "It is we who have changed." The ambiguous interweaving of the dreams and memories of the two men goes further than Lee, but strengthens the sense of the bond between them, mediated not only by their closeness to the vampire, but to death—when Snake is knifed in the squat which he sees suddenly as some Boschian bedlam, it is Vassu in the brownstone's clean kitchen who catches himself against the table with the pain. The novelette closes with the last living thought of Vassu, but the episode continues into a coda of the morning after, when Snake brings his first cup of wine to the Princess, the tentative, serious gesture of service showing how far he has altered already from the twitchy, transactional hustler just as her slight, wistful touch of his cheek signifies her acceptance of his importance to her and the recognition that he is not Vassu who gave them into one another's care and died as they sealed it with the customs of her branch of the family, neither forgotten nor interchangeably discarded. We might surmise as much from the original text; the adaptation makes sure we know it; it doesn't elaborate too far and it doesn't spoil the tone of the novelette which remains one of the gentlest vampire stories I know, certainly far more so than Lee's "Stained with Crimson" (The Book of the Damned, 1988) with which it shares the cyclical conceit of a vampire that can be handed on like an heirloom or an infection from one mortal to the next. I am not enamored of the makeup for the Princess, either, but I can at least appreciate its indication that whatever the vampires of this world may be, the answer was never human.
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, runs the canticle of the title, the peaceful dismissal of the faithful servant, secundum verbum tuum in pace. I have no idea what Lee thought of this translation of her words, but I was left wondering who in the '80's or '90's could have given it the 45-minute treatment that would have allowed it to breathe—it might be too much to hope that the CGI could have been entirely eschewed. It does so well with parts of her dialogue, I wish it had included more. I can't hold it fairly against Tierney that he is not as flawlessly leopardine as Lee's Snake, but he pulls off the shape-shifting of a callow street kid confronted with the supernatural, scoffing and drawn to it even without knowing that it could save his life and what he might in time come to refer to as his soul. I wasn't sure how much of Orsini's vampirism I believed until she kissed Vassu for the last time and it was not a human farewell. Warner's just magnificent. He feels like two hundred years. Both seasons of The Hunger are available on Freevee, but I was so shocked that the DVDs were in my local library system that I requested the relevant season at once. Had I watched any TV in college that wasn't communally viewed cassettes of British comedy, I could have seen the original airing effectively for my birthday. Since I was feverishly collecting any new or used Tanith Lee I happened onto at that time, I am sure it would have had an effect. Incidentally, I have seen David Bowie onscreen in the years since his death—including in Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983)—but it was still faintly strange to find his host character at the close of this episode contemplating his own granite-chiseled birth and death dates. "When the end of the day is near and you know that tomorrow will not come, will you have the grace to rest in peace?" This fire brought to you by my changed backers at Patreon.