MOVIE REVIEW - ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

VAMPIRE WEEKENDS

Movie Review – Only Lovers Left Alive

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Review by Charlie Tarabour

It’s difficult to look at one of Jim Jarmusch’s movies on it’s own. He develops similar themes among the same sorts of characters in all his movies. It’s almost like he’s perpetually re-making or translating the same movie over and over again. But, it never feels old. He’s mastered stories of alienated “tourists”, serenely rootless and drifting among the evocative ruins of modernity. And for this timeless theme, to make his use of a vampire motif in his latest movie, “Only Lovers Left Alive”, makes all too much sense.

Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are centuries-old vampires who reunite after who-knows-how-many years apart. They have firsthand knowledge of Western Civilization’s cultural triumphs and unprecedented atrocities, Eve with a little more ease than Adam (she’s had several centuries more practice). They are non-metaphorical agents of cultural memory. I mean, look at their names.

A great thing “Only Lovers Left Alive” accomplishes is its daring to look into the abyss that would accompany immortality. I’ve never seen a vampire resemble what I would actually imagine a person with all the time in the world would resemble until I saw this movie. They would do what Eve does and read as much as they can in as many languages as they can continue to learn. They would do what Adam does and continually experiment with and enrich their knowledge of music.

It is no wonder Adam is depressed. He gave ideas to Schubert, fraternized with Mary Shelley, and watched Eddie Cochran live. He’s endured unfathomable durations and the slow-motion crushing waves of modernity. He and Eve, along with a few other vampires, carry the weight of human experience. Their conversations are loaded with cultural and philosophical resonance. They wonder when The Gas Wars will end and when The Water Wars will begin.

For Adam, “All the sand’s at the bottom of the hourglass”. Eve tells him to turn to the hourglass over. These vampire lovers symbolize both the destruction and rebirth of humanity. They evoke the cycles of history and show us that they are just that, cycles. Eve tells Adam “the world is full of the most beautiful instruments”, in an effort to remind Adam that hope lives dormant among these ruins and needs only to be awoken, like the love of a vampire.

Music is of much importance to the movie, even for a Jim Jarmusch movie. There are many discussions about music, instruments, and analog recording shared by Adam and his assistant/friend Ian (Anton Yelchin) who looks like he just wandered off the set of “Almost Famous”. And the opening shot of the movie is of a spinning record album followed by rotating shots of strung out Adam and Eve in their separate worlds, all accompanied by a hypnotic, slowed-down version of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love.” The lyrics of which foreshadows these themes of renewal and endlessness through the effective idiom of pop music: