How about a vampire movie with no biting, no sex, and no thrill-a-minute action sequences, but where the millennial-old vampire lovers sleep a lot, don’t comb their hair, but really really love each other? Sound like a hot date movie?
Wait,
there’s more. Well, kind of more. Yeah, these vampires sleep a lot during the
movie, but it’s Tilda Swinton, whose natural vampiric good looks require little
enhancement, and Tom Hiddleston, both sleeping naked atop a chaste coverlet.
Your heart rate might go up just listening to their light snores, but only if
you’re a Jarmusch hipster and so totally cool that you feel his aesthetic. If so, Only Lovers
Left Alive is the vampire love story for you.
A testimony
to Adam and Eve’s eternal love is that although they live apart–he, in the
abandoned and economically desolate suburbs of Detroit; she, in a surprisingly
clean Tangiers–they keep in touch via Skype. “I want to see you,” Adam says to
Eve. She presses the video display on her iPhone. Yes, Eve has the Apple. Adam does it his way. He’s using a gigundo dinosaur of a cell phone with a pull
out antennae, then connects a few wires and aims an equally ancient remote at a
TV console similar to the one my grandma owned. Eve’s face appears. He looks
momentarily happy; this soon passes. He’s embraced technology, but not the
latest thing. He’s stuck in a vinyl world of classic 45s and bemoans the loss
of the Packard plant.
The tree of
bummed out vampires is vast and includes Louis in Interview
with the Vampire, Angel in Buffy and even
Bill Compton in True Blood, but they were known
to glory in the occasional bite or have sex with the woman they loved. Adam puts the bleak dollop of mope on
brooding. If he had a lawn, he’d be screaming at the kids to get the hell off
it.
Only black market blood is good enough for Jarmusch’s vamps, and not because they’ve morally
put aside their predatory ways. “It’s how they treat their world,” Adam says,
explaining his disillusionment with humans and their self-destructive
lifestyles. He calls the humans zombies.
“Who you
calling a zombie, bro?” I longed to hear those words from some soulless
musician in the nightclub Adam and Eve deigned to visit.
I’m sure
Adam and Eve sucked blood from the occasional syphilitic or plague ridden human
in the past, but in Jarmuschland, vampires no longer tolerate diseased blood.
Or, is it that like many humans who prefer bottled to tap water, these vampires
are the ultimate consumers? They like their human blood bottled or packaged and
with advance hype. In Eve’s words, “The good stuff.”
Adam and
Eve are mismatched lovers, proving that opposites attract.
Only Lovers Left
Alive is not a story so much as a whimsy, and a conceited
one at that. Their snobbery is dangerous. It leads to estrangement from all
that they value. Creativity and
destructiveness are part of humanity, their life source. If they lose that
connection, what good is their art?
An acute
appreciation of irony is at the core of their aesthetic, as it must be with all
intellectual snobs. In the end, they must return to their primitive state and
prey on young lovers in order to live. “What choice do we have,” Eve says.
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch;
director of photography, Yorick Le Saux; edited by Affonso Goncalves; music by
Jozef Van Wissem; production design by Marco Bittner Rosser; costumes by Bina
Daigeler; produced by Jeremy Thomas and Reinhard Brundig; released by Sony
Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.
WITH: Tom Hiddleston (Adam), Tilda Swinton (Eve), Mia
Wasikowska (Ava), John Hurt (Marlowe), Anton Yelchin (Ian) and Jeffrey Wright
(Dr. Watson).
Vampire Musings and Reviews:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment