By Peter Williamson
Opinion Section Editor
On Only Lovers Left Alive, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt
One might think that by now, the topic of vampires, although having carved out its wide niche in the fantasy genre, is slowly fading from the height of the craze it experienced in the last years. However, Jim Jarmusch has shown us in his newest creation that the vampire in film and music is still alive and kicking.
The movie starts out in the gloomy and grey city of Detroit – home to Adam, a musically gifted vampire, who is becoming increasingly depressed by the world around him. His outlook on the future of humanity is rather bleak: he calls people “zombies”, as he views them as a shambling, mindless mass aimed directly at their own destruction. The vampires themselves aren’t doing too hot either: a mysterious, deadly disease transmitted through blood has decimated the vampire population and made the procuring of blood a risky undertaking. However, the one ray of light in his dark world is his beloved wife, Eve: she, – also a vampire – is in stark contrast to Adam: she loves life and has a kind and optimistic outlook on the nature of things and has opted to live in Tangier, Morroco, a city brimming with exotic vibes and dark-side alleys. Feeling lost without her, Adam asks her to return to him. Her arrival gives way to a dark and macabre rollercoaster of events…
One of the things I really liked about the movie was the exquisite cinematog
raphy. Jarmusch is not afraid of experimenting with contrasting color schemes, oscillating between raw, bright shots and cool, dark atmospheric ones. Especially the fact that the entire movie is set at night makes it quite a special experience and really lets the viewer get a glimpse of the protagonists’ world. Throughout the whole movie, we hear a mix of exotic and medieval sounds intermingled with modern-day rock, giving it a soundtrack to remember (go and listen to it!).
The movie is punctuated with wry and dark humor, bordering on the cynical at times – which I simply love. It’s not so omnipresent that it turns the movie into a gothic-vaudevillian spectacle, and just enough to make you try your hardest to suppress laughing out loud in a room of strangers. It is also recommendable for those that wonder what living for an eternity must feel like – and how one would deal with the symptoms of fatigue that necessarily arise after seeing people repeat the same mistakes over and over again. At times, the Vampires seem tragically human; at other times, they seem nothing like us. Jarmusch achieves a good balance between the ups and downs of the movies, which in the end feels just a bit too short – but that might be due its great characters and scenery.
All in all, I found it to be a very enjoyable and thought-provoking movie, combining many great elements in current popular culture, philosophy and art while at the same time letting the protagonists hold up a mirror for us in which we may be able to get a better perspective on our own current society – for instance the off-hand commentary on the current precarious state of the world and our uncertain future, for example in a scene where Adam asks Eve whether humans are still fighting over oil, or whether they have started warring over water already. The movie leaves the audience with the following: are YOU just a Zombie, or are you something more?
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85 %
Soundtrack listing: http://www.bbook.com/enjoy-taste-blood-jim-jarmuschs-lovers-left-alive-soundtrack/
Official Soundtrack release: 21st of February
DVD-release: 30. May
Peter Williamson, class of 2015, is a Politics and Sociology major from Hamburg, Germany.
