I caught Jim Jarmusch‘s not-so-typical vampire feature Only Lovers Left Alive at the Cannes Film Festival this year and was incredibly surprised. I wasn’t sure what to expect walking in and was especially concerned it would be a ponderous slog, but instead it’s a far more lively (by Jarmusch standards) movie than I expected and delivers the kind of humor you’d expect from a Jarmusch picture and quite a bit of it at that.
Here’s the opening from my Cannes review that gets into some story details:
It’s no surprise Jim Jarmusch‘s vampire love story Only Lovers Left Alive isn’t a vampire film in the same vein as anything you’ve seen come out of Hollywood. These vampires don’t glitter and they’ve found more conventional ways to sate their blood lust than risking exposure or worse by draining human beings. There is, however, an overall sense of loneliness and the characters are quite moody as most vampires tend to be. Their disgruntled, “hate the world” nature speaks to the film’s larger theme, and while it isn’t exactly ground-breaking, in terms of execution, it’s quietly entertaining.
The story centers on centuries old vampire lovers Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), the first of many recognizable/metaphorical/playful names used within the narrative. Though, when it comes to these two names Jarmusch credits his inspiration as not from the Bible, but from Mark Twain’s “The Diaries of Adam and Eve”, which itself has Biblical roots. I’ve never read Twain’s collection of short stories, which sounds like it was something more of a comedic look at the gender divide, but Only Lovers Left Alive is a rather cynical look at the degradation of society through the eyes of vampires that have lived through the times of Shakespeare and Schubert, two examples the film determines to be on the verge of becoming obsolete and/or forgotten in today’s society.
You can read the full review right here, check out the trailer below and look for this one in 2014 from Sony Pictures Classics.
