Only Lovers Left Alive
With a body of work built slowly over four decades, director Jim Jarmusch has always crafted his projects carefully, flitting between genres and experimenting with formats from the multiple narratives of Mystery Train and Night of Earth to the black and white historical Dead Man and the urban samurai of Ghost Dog, and nor are the films he creates in any rush to explain themselves. Having an agreement in place with his cast, Jarmusch sought finance for several years before Only Lovers Left Alive finally entered production, but the wait for this glimpse into eternity has been worth it.
Reclusive vampire Adam (Tom Hiddleston) exists in a derelict house on the outskirts of Detroit, his only contact with humanity through Ian (Anton Yelchin) who brings him antique instruments and drip feeds Adam’s music to the underground scene and his contact at the hospital who accepts substantial cash deposits in return for access to the blood bank. He lives off the grid, shunning people as much as he shuns sunlight and even stealing the electricity with which he powers his recording studio, and contemplating suicide he asks Ian to procure him a bullet made of hardwood
The disorienting beauty of the opening titles giving way to the sound of retro chic vinyl, even separated from his wife by thousands of miles, their lives still spiral together, and when Eve (Tilda Swinton) calls him, knowing he will refuse to travel to her, she agrees that she will make the trip to visit him. In Tangiers, her life is different; a woman alone, she walks the streets with nothing to fear, an alpha predator, spending time with her mentor Marlowe (John Hurt) who supplies her with “the good stuff,” she packs a suitcase of favourite novels to be her travelling companions as she makes arrangements to travel strictly by night.
Between the books, the guitars and the vinyl, they surround themselves with objects of antiquity to hold the past around them as the world beyond sweeps into the future, trying to slow the passage of time. Eve uses her iPhone comfortably, but Adam barely copes with the present, migrating to the hospital from his desolate industrial wilderness.
Still brooding over a decades past incident involving her younger sister, Eve’s announcement that Ava (Mia Wasikowska) has been in touch again and plans to visit is received without enthusiasm. Young, vivacious, demanding and connected to the world, everything Adam is not, her inevitable arrival fuels his resentment and disrupts their lives.
Referring to humanity as zombies, Adam echoes Marlowe’s disillusionment with their principal food source’s management of the planet: “They’ve contaminated their blood as well as their water.” Conversely, with an encyclopaedic knowledge and finding joy in the cracks where others would never look, Eve pragmatically sees potential even in the ruins: “There is water here. When the cities in the south have burned, this place will bloom again.”
As would be expected, the cast are flawless, Swinton ethereal, exotic and intense while Hiddleston is entirely disassociated from his nocturnal life before a return to Tangiers brings urgency and more exotic rhythms to his previously discordant music. Composed with overlapping sounds and images and with eternity to play in, the pace of the film reflects their lives and can be no more than a fragment of a greater continuity, a visit with an a pair of engaging eccentrics who wear sunglasses at night.
Only Lovers Left Alive is currently on general release
