Only Lovers Left Alive
May. 3rd, 2014 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI've heard the name Jim Jarmusch around because I read a lot of film criticism, but I didn't have his filmography firmly enough in my head to know whether I'd seen anything else he directed when I went into the theatre for Only Lovers Left Alive. It turns out that yes, I've seen two-- Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, with Forest Whitaker, in the theatre when I was in high school, a great movie that is impossible to describe in any way which makes it sound remotely as good as it is; and Dead Man, with Johnny Depp, on video, in college, which I hated. I hate Dead Man so fervently that I briefly considered boycotting everyone who had ever been associated with it. I hate Dead Man so thoroughly that I try as hard as I can to forget that it exists, and I am pleased when I manage and sad when something reminds me of it again. I don't know how to begin to explain why I hate it so much; I tend to resort to helpless gesture. Arm-flailing. Epithets. Anyway, because I blocked it out, I forgot Jim Jarmusch had directed that. So it's probably just as well I didn't look up the director before Only Lovers Left Alive.
Which turns out to be more describable, if not necessarily more accessible, than Ghost Dog, and also turns out to be a good movie. It is a vampire movie which never uses the word vampire. It would make a fascinating double feature with Neil Jordan's Byzantium, also a vampire movie which never uses the word. Both films pace themselves at the deliberate slowness of things dissociated from human time, but where Byzantium contains a kind of detached analysis of cruelty, Only Lovers Left Alive intersects with horror only in so much as the feeding requirements of vampires mean that vampires can produce horror and live with it intimately. Of course, to the vampire, blood and horror are not necessarily in any way related to each other.
Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) live on separate continents, in tumbledown old spaces filled with piles of art. They have been married a very, very, very long time. They have been married sufficiently long that, watching them, I became fairly certain that Eve and Adam are not only noms de guerre but the names they took upon getting married, because those names express something about the way they approach the world. What plot there is is almost domestic comedy: Adam is somewhat depressed, or at least wishes to indicate that he is, so that Eve will visit him; the realities of travel are onerous; the realities of in-laws are more onerous still; the supply of blood is difficult to maintain, since they prefer to buy blood or obtain it from middlemen, rather than killing for it in a world in which such things are noticeable. A lot of the movie is very funny (Mia Wasikowska, as Ava, Eve's sister, earned my eternal approbation by managing to sum up everything obnoxious possible about a perky younger sister with merely the sound she produces when she knocks on the door).
The tone is difficult to describe, because it is so unrelated to most tones movies have. Every emotion Adam and Eve have is both transient and part of the conversation they've been having for centuries. They can be distracted to the point of flightiness, because anything really important will turn up again later. They do feel things deeply, but there's so much that they have to get around to. Adam's dramatic melancholia is both completely real and completely theatrical, and something he is probably growing out of as the centuries go by, albeit very slowly. He hasn't grown out of it enough yet not to let it make him a bit of an asshole, but he has just enough to notice that he's being one. Vampire mythology, and the paranormal in general, hover just around the edges. Adam powers his house with a Tesla-designed generator, producing electricity from the ground itself. Would this generator work if anyone else had built it? This is not a question which occurs to Adam. Coyotes track the couple, howling, as they walk through the streets-- well, it is an abandoned area of Detroit, so maybe that would happen anyway. Amanita phalloides, out of season, appear behind a house they live in, and they don't attempt to explain that at all, even though to me as a viewer it seems obvious, bright, shiny, innocuous-looking death cropping up where vampires stay. They can probably influence human minds, but they don't, much, because there is no reason to. And this is not a film in which vampires make basic and cliche mistakes, because these are old vampires, who have lived a long time, and survived a great deal already.
Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston bring an amazing physicality to their roles. They look the same age and they look the same species. They move the same. They move the way people do who know one another so well that they anticipate one another's movements. They aren't particularly gendered, in body language, or in hobbies, or in dress. It's impossible to tell whether there is no sexuality between them, or one so all-pervading that it can't be seen separately from everything else, and it doesn't matter. But she burns with happiness, at being in the world, at living, and he doesn't, which is the principal difference. There's a scene where, on her way to him, she packs up some books, and we see her sitting down to pore over them. I was reminded of the legend that, if you pile books around your bed, a vampire will not be able to reach you, because they must read every word before they can walk by the pile. (It also works with grains of rice, or lentils, or sesame seeds, which they must count.) But her expression of delight indicates that, even though she might be reading because she must read the entire book every time she picks a book up, she'd read them all anyway if she didn't have to. She doesn't care about the amount of time involved, because she has all the time in the world. He doesn't care about time either-- he simply never looks so delighted. She says yes to life and he says, maybe, or what was the question again? And this is the root of their long, long conversation. Depicting a not particularly important or significant stretch of that conversation, showing how that might actually work over a span of immortality, is the artistic work of the movie, at which I believe it succeeds.
The film also contains John Hurt, playing Kit Marlowe as a man vampirized late enough in life that the change is not an explanation for whatever happened at Deptford, still gallant enough to politely mention Tom Hiddleston's extraordinary beauty, in the terms of a gentleman carrying out an obligation, and then setting the subject down with some relief. Mia Wasikowska, as aforementioned, the world's brattiest eternally vaguely-teenage sister. Jeffrey Wright, as a human doctor who is in the vampire movie the rest of the cast is not playing, so that he keeps looking vaguely over his shoulder in some nervousness. Detroit, at night. Tangiers, at night. There are no scenes not at night. A lot of music, some live and some old. A very few perfectly chosen special effects. I've seen it reviewed as a cautionary tale-- Vampiric Hipsters Could Be Living In Your Neighborhood!-- and yes, the protagonists did like whatever it was before it was cool, no matter what we might be talking about. But I think the film earns its slow pace, its interludes in which nothing particularly happens. They make up the world the way its characters see it, in which nothing much ever particularly happens, until it does.
Which is the point.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
Which turns out to be more describable, if not necessarily more accessible, than Ghost Dog, and also turns out to be a good movie. It is a vampire movie which never uses the word vampire. It would make a fascinating double feature with Neil Jordan's Byzantium, also a vampire movie which never uses the word. Both films pace themselves at the deliberate slowness of things dissociated from human time, but where Byzantium contains a kind of detached analysis of cruelty, Only Lovers Left Alive intersects with horror only in so much as the feeding requirements of vampires mean that vampires can produce horror and live with it intimately. Of course, to the vampire, blood and horror are not necessarily in any way related to each other.
Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) live on separate continents, in tumbledown old spaces filled with piles of art. They have been married a very, very, very long time. They have been married sufficiently long that, watching them, I became fairly certain that Eve and Adam are not only noms de guerre but the names they took upon getting married, because those names express something about the way they approach the world. What plot there is is almost domestic comedy: Adam is somewhat depressed, or at least wishes to indicate that he is, so that Eve will visit him; the realities of travel are onerous; the realities of in-laws are more onerous still; the supply of blood is difficult to maintain, since they prefer to buy blood or obtain it from middlemen, rather than killing for it in a world in which such things are noticeable. A lot of the movie is very funny (Mia Wasikowska, as Ava, Eve's sister, earned my eternal approbation by managing to sum up everything obnoxious possible about a perky younger sister with merely the sound she produces when she knocks on the door).
The tone is difficult to describe, because it is so unrelated to most tones movies have. Every emotion Adam and Eve have is both transient and part of the conversation they've been having for centuries. They can be distracted to the point of flightiness, because anything really important will turn up again later. They do feel things deeply, but there's so much that they have to get around to. Adam's dramatic melancholia is both completely real and completely theatrical, and something he is probably growing out of as the centuries go by, albeit very slowly. He hasn't grown out of it enough yet not to let it make him a bit of an asshole, but he has just enough to notice that he's being one. Vampire mythology, and the paranormal in general, hover just around the edges. Adam powers his house with a Tesla-designed generator, producing electricity from the ground itself. Would this generator work if anyone else had built it? This is not a question which occurs to Adam. Coyotes track the couple, howling, as they walk through the streets-- well, it is an abandoned area of Detroit, so maybe that would happen anyway. Amanita phalloides, out of season, appear behind a house they live in, and they don't attempt to explain that at all, even though to me as a viewer it seems obvious, bright, shiny, innocuous-looking death cropping up where vampires stay. They can probably influence human minds, but they don't, much, because there is no reason to. And this is not a film in which vampires make basic and cliche mistakes, because these are old vampires, who have lived a long time, and survived a great deal already.
Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston bring an amazing physicality to their roles. They look the same age and they look the same species. They move the same. They move the way people do who know one another so well that they anticipate one another's movements. They aren't particularly gendered, in body language, or in hobbies, or in dress. It's impossible to tell whether there is no sexuality between them, or one so all-pervading that it can't be seen separately from everything else, and it doesn't matter. But she burns with happiness, at being in the world, at living, and he doesn't, which is the principal difference. There's a scene where, on her way to him, she packs up some books, and we see her sitting down to pore over them. I was reminded of the legend that, if you pile books around your bed, a vampire will not be able to reach you, because they must read every word before they can walk by the pile. (It also works with grains of rice, or lentils, or sesame seeds, which they must count.) But her expression of delight indicates that, even though she might be reading because she must read the entire book every time she picks a book up, she'd read them all anyway if she didn't have to. She doesn't care about the amount of time involved, because she has all the time in the world. He doesn't care about time either-- he simply never looks so delighted. She says yes to life and he says, maybe, or what was the question again? And this is the root of their long, long conversation. Depicting a not particularly important or significant stretch of that conversation, showing how that might actually work over a span of immortality, is the artistic work of the movie, at which I believe it succeeds.
The film also contains John Hurt, playing Kit Marlowe as a man vampirized late enough in life that the change is not an explanation for whatever happened at Deptford, still gallant enough to politely mention Tom Hiddleston's extraordinary beauty, in the terms of a gentleman carrying out an obligation, and then setting the subject down with some relief. Mia Wasikowska, as aforementioned, the world's brattiest eternally vaguely-teenage sister. Jeffrey Wright, as a human doctor who is in the vampire movie the rest of the cast is not playing, so that he keeps looking vaguely over his shoulder in some nervousness. Detroit, at night. Tangiers, at night. There are no scenes not at night. A lot of music, some live and some old. A very few perfectly chosen special effects. I've seen it reviewed as a cautionary tale-- Vampiric Hipsters Could Be Living In Your Neighborhood!-- and yes, the protagonists did like whatever it was before it was cool, no matter what we might be talking about. But I think the film earns its slow pace, its interludes in which nothing particularly happens. They make up the world the way its characters see it, in which nothing much ever particularly happens, until it does.
Which is the point.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
