"We no longer exist as playwrights or actors but as passive spectators of an empty scene." — Baudrillard
Jim Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive" opens with shots of rotating vinyl records. We're then introduced to group of dejected vampires, all of whom are hiding from a contemporary world deemed to be uncultured, corrupt, primitive and base. Unsurprisingly, these vampires refer to the humans who populate this world as "zombies"; brainless consumers who lack taste, self-reflexivity, any capacity for discernment, and who seem to exist only to gorge on whatever is put before them. The vampires, meanwhile, feast on high art, fine literature and the finest of finery. They have style.
Jarmusch's chief vampires are Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. Perhaps like Jarmusch himself, they're a pair of hipsters, emblematic of an artistic underground which turns its nose up to cities and civilisations which once held promise but now wallow in "bad taste". When Adam and Eve are not salivating over vintage guitars and fine records, they're suckling on flavoursome human blood. But this blood is becoming contaminated, a contamination which Jarmusch aligns to everything from grubby record producers, to pollution, to the dead-ends and deadlocks of Western capitalism. Ironic for a vampire, Adam thinks everyone and everything else sucks.
And so Adam and Eve spend most of Jarmusch's film moaning about the state of the arts, the death of creativity and reminiscing about the many fine philosophers, artists and personalities (though they admit Lord Byron was a "pretentious old bore") they met over the course of their lengthy lives. Meanwhile, new stuff is dismissed. "We've seen all this before," Eve grumbles, encapsulating the film's big joke: vampires as the ultimate world-weary hipsters, old-school connoisseurs whose immortality has granted them the ability to have literally "already seen everything long before you did". Significantly, Adam avoids modern technology, but Eve and her sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) are hooked on Youtube, web-cams and internet downloads, technology which rubs up against the vampires' retrogressive, archival, hipster attitudes. Ava in particular is hooked on the new. Part of the blip-time generation, and not possessing the restraint and patience of her elders, she's essentially suckered by the pull of contemporary junk food. She dies feasting on tainted human blood.
Adam lives in Detroit, recently rendered a wasteland by a global capitalism which turns history into an endless present and which bulldozes all values (and the generational clashes which oft fuelled art) in favour for production and profit. Like Jarmuschs's opening shot of spinning records, what the zombies consume is never "new", just the same old recycled tropes and trends. As the spinning record implies, Jarmusch's film is obsessed with the immobility, stagnation and repetition which exists behind illusions of motion. Things go round and around, but only the same destinations are repeatedly revisited. To the vampires, romantic, amorous and in search of "authenticity", this existence is unbearable. Ironically for a film about the allure of "new art", Jarmusch notoriously plagiarised the script to "Dead Man" from Rudy Wurlitzer and was also sued for plagiarising "Broken Flowers".
Early in "Only Lovers Left Alive", Adam listens to "Funnel of Love", a song about being sucked into a spinning, romantic abyss. Adam clings to the past, hiding from the sterility of a white/Anglo/ubiquitous culture which closes in on him like daylight suffocates and kills the vampire. Like the bored depressives of Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" and "Stranger Than Paradise", Adam resists by barricading himself in private fortresses. But isolation takes its toll; Adam contemplates suicide. He wants out. He wants death! Eva encourages Adam to visit underground clubs and basement rock bands, Gothic places in the middle-of-nowhere where "genuine" art searches for notice like struggling weeds.
Like George Romero's early films, "Only Lovers Left Alive" pits the last humans (the lovers, the vampires) against homo-economicus. Unlike Romero, Jarmusch ends on a note of optimism. The West may be dead, but hope exists in the East, in Morocco, Tangiers, where the Third World's efforts at emancipation produce cocktails, arts, movements and moments which temporarily pique Adam's interests. And so like a spooky good-taste machine, or Hollywood talent scout, Adam navigates the shadows of Tangiers, until one song in particular (Hal, by Yasmine Hamdan, a song about the intertwining nature of love, nostalgia and loss) kisses his ears. He moves towards it, like a moth to a flame, and then feasts, devouring it whole. Ironically, it's this drive for consumption which fuels Adam's disenchantment; the vampires, in continually experiencing and so killing the new, propel their own suffering. Everything is eventually co-opted.
"Only Lovers Left Alive" features fine performances by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. They're stylish, well-coiffed and move about like fashion mannequins. Elsewhere Jarmusch tries for a very specific atmosphere – ethereal, hallucinogenic, lush - but he's not enough of a Sensualist to pull things off. Though his film has been praised for its "mood", this is all second-rate "atmosphere". The film is sharp, stiff, mannered and well composed, where it should perhaps be loose and fleeting, like the shadowy bars and dripping spaces of a Lynch, Wenders, Mann or even someone like late-career Neil Jordan or Michael Curtiz. Resolutely postmodern (and shot like a comic-book or Coen Brothers flick), "Lovers'" form is exactly what its vampires denounce.
8/10 - See "A Prairie Home Companion".
Jim Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive" opens with shots of rotating vinyl records. We're then introduced to group of dejected vampires, all of whom are hiding from a contemporary world deemed to be uncultured, corrupt, primitive and base. Unsurprisingly, these vampires refer to the humans who populate this world as "zombies"; brainless consumers who lack taste, self-reflexivity, any capacity for discernment, and who seem to exist only to gorge on whatever is put before them. The vampires, meanwhile, feast on high art, fine literature and the finest of finery. They have style.
Jarmusch's chief vampires are Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. Perhaps like Jarmusch himself, they're a pair of hipsters, emblematic of an artistic underground which turns its nose up to cities and civilisations which once held promise but now wallow in "bad taste". When Adam and Eve are not salivating over vintage guitars and fine records, they're suckling on flavoursome human blood. But this blood is becoming contaminated, a contamination which Jarmusch aligns to everything from grubby record producers, to pollution, to the dead-ends and deadlocks of Western capitalism. Ironic for a vampire, Adam thinks everyone and everything else sucks.
And so Adam and Eve spend most of Jarmusch's film moaning about the state of the arts, the death of creativity and reminiscing about the many fine philosophers, artists and personalities (though they admit Lord Byron was a "pretentious old bore") they met over the course of their lengthy lives. Meanwhile, new stuff is dismissed. "We've seen all this before," Eve grumbles, encapsulating the film's big joke: vampires as the ultimate world-weary hipsters, old-school connoisseurs whose immortality has granted them the ability to have literally "already seen everything long before you did". Significantly, Adam avoids modern technology, but Eve and her sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) are hooked on Youtube, web-cams and internet downloads, technology which rubs up against the vampires' retrogressive, archival, hipster attitudes. Ava in particular is hooked on the new. Part of the blip-time generation, and not possessing the restraint and patience of her elders, she's essentially suckered by the pull of contemporary junk food. She dies feasting on tainted human blood.
Adam lives in Detroit, recently rendered a wasteland by a global capitalism which turns history into an endless present and which bulldozes all values (and the generational clashes which oft fuelled art) in favour for production and profit. Like Jarmuschs's opening shot of spinning records, what the zombies consume is never "new", just the same old recycled tropes and trends. As the spinning record implies, Jarmusch's film is obsessed with the immobility, stagnation and repetition which exists behind illusions of motion. Things go round and around, but only the same destinations are repeatedly revisited. To the vampires, romantic, amorous and in search of "authenticity", this existence is unbearable. Ironically for a film about the allure of "new art", Jarmusch notoriously plagiarised the script to "Dead Man" from Rudy Wurlitzer and was also sued for plagiarising "Broken Flowers".
Early in "Only Lovers Left Alive", Adam listens to "Funnel of Love", a song about being sucked into a spinning, romantic abyss. Adam clings to the past, hiding from the sterility of a white/Anglo/ubiquitous culture which closes in on him like daylight suffocates and kills the vampire. Like the bored depressives of Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" and "Stranger Than Paradise", Adam resists by barricading himself in private fortresses. But isolation takes its toll; Adam contemplates suicide. He wants out. He wants death! Eva encourages Adam to visit underground clubs and basement rock bands, Gothic places in the middle-of-nowhere where "genuine" art searches for notice like struggling weeds.
Like George Romero's early films, "Only Lovers Left Alive" pits the last humans (the lovers, the vampires) against homo-economicus. Unlike Romero, Jarmusch ends on a note of optimism. The West may be dead, but hope exists in the East, in Morocco, Tangiers, where the Third World's efforts at emancipation produce cocktails, arts, movements and moments which temporarily pique Adam's interests. And so like a spooky good-taste machine, or Hollywood talent scout, Adam navigates the shadows of Tangiers, until one song in particular (Hal, by Yasmine Hamdan, a song about the intertwining nature of love, nostalgia and loss) kisses his ears. He moves towards it, like a moth to a flame, and then feasts, devouring it whole. Ironically, it's this drive for consumption which fuels Adam's disenchantment; the vampires, in continually experiencing and so killing the new, propel their own suffering. Everything is eventually co-opted.
"Only Lovers Left Alive" features fine performances by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. They're stylish, well-coiffed and move about like fashion mannequins. Elsewhere Jarmusch tries for a very specific atmosphere – ethereal, hallucinogenic, lush - but he's not enough of a Sensualist to pull things off. Though his film has been praised for its "mood", this is all second-rate "atmosphere". The film is sharp, stiff, mannered and well composed, where it should perhaps be loose and fleeting, like the shadowy bars and dripping spaces of a Lynch, Wenders, Mann or even someone like late-career Neil Jordan or Michael Curtiz. Resolutely postmodern (and shot like a comic-book or Coen Brothers flick), "Lovers'" form is exactly what its vampires denounce.
8/10 - See "A Prairie Home Companion".