[Cliccate qui per la versione in italiano]
Good day my dears.
No good old silents this time, sorry.
A sensational fact occurred this week: I went to the cinema.
It’s been like *five* months since the last time, could you believe that? So I hope you’ll understand my need to tell you about the wonderful film I’ve seen.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.
Let’s start straight away with the technical details:
Writer and Director: Jim Jarmusch
Production: Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Pandora Filmproduktion, Snow Wolf Produktion
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, etc.
123 mins, colour.
(Only Lovers Left Alive on IMDb)
IMDb rating: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 89%
Polenta’s rating: ∞ awes
Plot:
Adam is a reclusive gloomy musician of Detroit. He’s married to Eve who lives in Tangier, Morocco.
The two lovers are vampires. They sleep during the day, go around at night and drink blood from sacks provided by bribe-lover doctors.
Their long life has given them the chance to meet the greatest artists of all time, collect precious books, ancient musical instruments and learn many languages.
They reunite after a long time to stay peacefully together, at least until Eve’s younger annoying sister decides to pass by and bring a bit of confusion in their every night not-life.
Polenta’s comment:
I could talk for hours about this film, but in the end there’s a single word who can describe it: BEAUTIFUL.
And I don’t mean ‘pretty’ or ‘nice’ kind of beautiful, I mean beautiful in the highest aesthetic way possible.
Which is, in fact, the film’s purpose.
The focus is not the plot; actually, there’s not much going on in this movie.
The real main character here is the Beauty itself.
We all know trailers can be very deceptive, and that’s why I was expecting some kind of pathetic plot twist involving Eve’s sister. I thought she would’ve messed up our heroes’ love life making them fight or something, as in all the romantic comedy/drama films.
How fool I was.
This film is so much more.
At the beginning, Adam is acting all emo and depressed -but not in the cliche Brad-Pitt-way of the usual modern vampire tormented by the sense of guilt- for a reason that I completely understand and support: the zombies are ruining the planet and destroying all the beauty and the purity of the world. Of course, those he call zombies are the humans, not the ones half rotten who wanders looking for brains to eat.
So, Eve has to leave her beautiful house filled with ancient books in Tangier and her dearest friend Marlowe (an amazing -as always- John Hurt) to reach her lover in the miserable Detroit suburbs.
Adam, Eve and Marlowe are the Beauty advocates. They constantly look for the finest and purest things in life, from blood to musical instruments.
Eve tries to lift Adam’s spirit showing him the hidden beauty around him.
Her little sister is quite different. She adopted a modern lifestyle and appears in their life just the time necessary to kill Adam’s ‘friend’, a human which was is only connection with the outside world.
There’s no happy ending for them.
Because of the corruption of the world, finding pure blood is more and more difficult and Marlowe, old and ill, dies poisoned by contaminated blood.
Adam and Eve seem to be destined to starve to death for the same reason. The real ending is, maybe, even worse: the last paladins of elegance and aesthetic are forced to feed on casual humans they find in the street, biting their necks instead of drinking from precious stem glasses.
They regress to a more savage state, becoming inevitably part of the world decline.
Last considerations.
1) The music.
Ohmygod the music in this film. Hypnotic and powerful.
2) The photography. I really really love the films where almost every single framing could be a work of art, like a painting. Every scene is accurately studied to be a wonderful gift for the eyes.
I found this ‘painting’ effect in other films and those happen to be my all-time favourites. Just a couple of examples: The Fall and Womb. Don’t worry, I’m definitely going to write about them sooner or later.
Funny fact: Adam’s ‘friend’, played by Anton Yelchin, is no other than Star Trek latest movies’ Chekov. And Fright Night’s main character, too (why does he always end up with vampires?).
I usually notice this kind of things, but this time I really didn’t recognise him. I’m getting old, guys.
For all the Jim Jarmusch fans out there: sorry, I’m a noob, I’ve only watched Mistery Train before.
So if I got something wrong or if you want to suggest me some other film of his, please tell me!
Thanks for reading, see you next time! =D
Here‘s the film trailer.
The Paranoid Celluloid 