This is a film about vampires, but its so far away from the genre that it defies it altogether. Its a mood piece, a film to fall into headlong and revel in its exquisite visual artistry, uber cool soundtrack and hipster characters. Pop culture references abound – and by pop culture, I mean the elegant cultural references that define our civilization, and not the post-digital age references. Our protagonists are, after all, several centuries old and have rubbed shoulders with Byron, Shelley and even Eddie Cochran, and one of their closest friends is Christopher Marlowe, who wrote all of what Shakespeare put out as his own work.
There is only the sliver of a story, and for the most part, it is about hanging out with our elegant, cooler-than-cool vampire duo – Adam (Tom Hiddleston), a rock star for the ages, reclusive and melancholy, surrounding himself with scratchy vinyls and vintage guitars, composing hypnotic, dirge-like symphonies on retro recording equipment and spewing Einsteinisms with his world-weary intonation; and Eve (Tilda Swinton), all gorgeous bed hair and suave beige leather, an eccentric aristocrat who lives for her books, recognizes mushrooms by their latin names, speaks in a lazy, amused drawl, but nevertheless has a more pragmatic and optimistic world view, and urges Adam to live on for nature, surviving things, nurturing friendship, kindness and dancing. Their love story has a restrained, careful quality to it, like the love that endures after the initial euphoria has dispersed, an intimacy and tenderness borne of decades of togetherness. They are together, even when apart – Adam inhabits a splendid Victorian ruin of a mansion in Detroit, and Eve lives in the golden by-alleys of Tangier, until she decides to visit Adam to uplift his “suicidal romantic” tendencies. They sleep the day away, spend their nights driving Adam’s battered Jaguar through the streets of Detroit’s urban desolation, marveling at Jack White’s home and an old abandoned theater, playing chess while discussing literary greats. They have given up predation, which Eve dismisses as “so fucking 15th century”, and instead get their fix from packaged “good stuff” – Type O-Negative – that are sourced by, in Adam’s case, a droll Jeffrey Wright playing a doctor named Watson, and in Eve’s case, by her beloved Kit Marlowe. This is not so much from reasons of civilized progress but from a fear of contamination – indeed, throughout the film, humans are treated with snobbish disdain, for bringing chaos into their worlds and being out of control. Adam and Eve are old souls, having had the time to observe the progress of humankind with a wry, detached humor, and now looking for reasons to wake up every night and keep going. When you’ve lived through the Middle Ages, Tartars and Inquisitions, and seen the rise and fall of Copernicus, Newton, Galileo and Tesla, what do you find interesting anymore?
The film opens with a delightful spiraling shot, interspersing Eve and Adam in their decadence and a spinning 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl record playing a moody, slowed down, souped up version of Wanda Jackson’s Funnel of Love. (Aside: I repeat, any movie that opens with such fabulous music has got to be fabulous too – reference The Lincoln Lawyer and Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla). With the song, the camera spirals down, down onto the reclining figures of these supremely aloof beings. The rest of the soundtrack is tonally apt and just as crucial to the film as the stars themselves, composed by Jozef Van Wissem, in collaboration with Jim Jarmusch, the director himself. The soundtrack also features a hauntingly beautiful song by Lebanese singer Yasmin Hamdan, which causes Adam to experience an epiphanic moment of self-realization. The music perpetuates the feeling of timelessness and poignant beauty created by the film.
Everything in the film is to be savored, and the sluggish pace allows this indulgence. Even the names of the characters provide interesting reflections. Adam and Eve could be the biblical Adam and Eve, plagued by Ava as the snake in their dystopian garden, but I think they are closer to the quirky characters immortalized in Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve. They also take on several pseudonyms through the film – Eve goes by Fibonacci and Daisy Buchanan, and Adam is called Faust, Dr. Strangelove, Caligari and Stephen Dedalus. Much of the humor is dry and delivered deadpan, though Tilda Swinton gets most of the interesting lines. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” is one of my favorites.
Nothing much happens with the story – except for a very slight dramatic tension introduced by Ava, Eve’s wild-child sister, played by Mia Wasikowska. The loveliness of the film comes from its verbal interaction and lush production design. The prevailing mood of languor and sensual pleasure is derived from the fabulous surroundings that the lead characters curate for themselves and a near-mythic atmosphere brought to life by abandoned streets, glowing, surreal lighting, and decadent shots of the couple, all entangled alabaster limbs and sinuous grace, sleeping in glorious abandon or twirling dervish-like in dazed enjoyment of music. This is cinematic pleasure at its purest – I was absolutely floored by the movie and wouldn’t be surprised if it went on to become a cult classic.
My rating: 5/5 (Hiddleston explaining the theory of entanglement? Please)
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