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Hip Vampires That Don't Need Angst Or Camp, Only Killer Music

Sandro Kopp
/
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Right to left: Tom Hiddleston as Adam and Tilda Swinton as Eve

A host of vampires have been stalking movie screens, but mostly for younger audiences. Now the old pro Jim Jarmusch has come out with a vampire picture that’s not only for the young.

Jim Jarmusch brought his first feature Stranger than Paradise to the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 and instantly became the coolest filmmaker in the world. Thirty years later, with his new movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch is still the coolest filmmaker in the world.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire picture, but it's got nerve and confidence. It’s like none of the Dracula films, or recent movie vampires, who tend to be pale, limp, pouty teenagers with persecution complexes. Jarmusch's movie digs inside vampire lore where it finds desperation and need, and it makes the metaphor of drinking human blood urgent and important.

The film opens with undulating rhythms and gently spinning images that resolve in a 45 rpm vinyl record on a turntable. The two lead vampires are Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston). She lives in Tangier, while he's in Detroit. They've loved each other for hundreds of years, and one night Eve flies to Detroit – by conventional aircraft – to be with Adam.

http://youtu.be/r0EI2tqq4ck

That's pretty much the story.

They're lovers. Adam takes Eve on night drives around Detroit. They talk and they listen to terrific records from the 1950s. Adam has a magnificent collection of old electric guitars. From time to time he goes to a hospital where he buys fresh blood under the name Dr. Faust.

Other characters get names from literary figures like Christopher Marlowe, Stephen Daedalus and Daisy Buchanan. Only Lovers Left Alive skates close to being camp, but Jim Jarmusch is a wonderful filmmaker at his thorough best. Watching this film gives tremendous pleasure. It’s beautiful in its visual images, its rhythms and its simultaneous strangeness and familiarity. The film exults in the outlandish, but at the same time it feels completely under control.

The movie never winks at the audience; the actors never lose character. Tilda Swinton spends the entire movie acting under a fright wig, but she carries it like a fundamental part of herself.

Even when the characters wisecrack about age or Eve and Adam cool off with some O-negative blood popsicles, the movie holds its discipline. The hair and the jokes take shape from the structure of the movie, and while the film leaves room for the silliness, it holds its focus on a world of darkness and need in which the people care desperately about their survival and the love that has bound them for so many years.

The film exults in the outlandish, but at the same time it feels completely under control.

Eve and Adam need blood to live, and it has to be pure blood, which has grown hard to find. Blood has been contaminated; the world is rotting, and most of the “ingenious lovely things” in the world are from the past – those extraordinary old guitars, the Motown music, the now abandoned Packard automobile factory, where Adam says the most beautiful cars were made.

A sense that life on Earth is winding down creeps through the film, and it’s something that Jim Jarmuisch feels, understands and expresses in more visceral ways than Darren Aronofsky did in Noah.

This is a major league film.

It’s one of those rare movies that’s a total composition; there’s a bond between these actors, these costumes and sets – and this reverie about characters called vampires, who are obviously a dimension of us. Jarmusch ends Only Lovers Left Alive with a magnificent clash of simultaneous hope and brutality. Eve and Adam return to Tangier. They go to a club, where the singer Yasmine Hamdan performs. It’s nothing like Motown and there are no Fender guitars or basses, but her singing is electric. There’s more to come, and while it may not be happy, it can’t dislodge the ecstasy of Yasmine’s singing.

The best films of Jim Jarmusch – Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Night on Earth, Mystery Train, Ghost Dog, Dead Man – are haunted by their music. In its own fang-toothed way, Only Lovers Left Alive may be the best of them.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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