Only Lovers Left Alive: love in the time of death ~

As I think back to the film, it's haunting music, it's artful dark love, it's totally delicious slow-burning delight, I remember what someone was saying to students at the Art Fair yesterday "Every painting doesn't have to have a message. It's enough to say that it fills the senses and you feel good just looking at it."

I doubt you will ever see a film of this genre made the way this one is:style which gives meat to substance. A vampire film which is chic and full of a strange compassion and love. It's my first Jim Jarmusch and I am hooked, and all ready for his more famous films Coffee and Cigarettes, Dead Man, et al.

Tilda Swinton is the most chameleon-like actor ever (I will talk about her further in another of her performances, in another stupendous film, Snowpiercer, but that's later), and she gives her Eve a satisfied aura, a sophisticated woman you know you will be happy if she merely acknowledges your presence. It's a performance of an amazing smoothness. And then there is her lover of centuries, Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston with a tired and an almost-insolent indolence. Nobody has loved his claustrophobia and his funeral music more. And then there is Mia Wasikowska as Ava who spells trouble from the moment she walks into the twosome's beautiful life of serene darkness. She brings a dangerous disruption into the proceedings, and nothing remains the same. The BC/AD of Ava.

There is so much to love in this film. Adam's home is a triumph of pristine memorabilia, music equipment, books and a hundred artifacts probably collected over ten centuries.

 

The city of Detroit with it's ghost-like factories and inky streets. . Tangiers with it's Mediterranean-white walls, narrow lanes. There are non-seasonal mushrooms, bunches of messy wires, guitars of the most beautiful kind, conversations which go nowhere but make you smile as you listen in carefully (Eve: I'm sure she'll be very famous. Adam: God, I hope not. She's way too good for that.) and a bullet specially made. And there's one mesmerizing song, which comes near the end. And, after they discuss the lovely theory of entanglement, the final luscious choice of survival the lovers have to make. 

See the film. For the dark and love inside you. See it with all the lights off. With a terrific music system. And then let the velvety beauty of the film flow elegantly over you.