At one moment in Jim Jarmusch's new movie, Tilda Swinton's character points to the night sky and says: "There's a diamond up there the size of a planet. It emits the music of a gigantic gong." Jarmusch, on the hand, emits movies as if he has been smoking a gigantic bong. Only Lovers Left Alive is an indulgent, eccentric midnight movie with a great deal of muso musing about vinyl and guitars and cool retro stuff. If there was a prize at Cannes for Most Studenty Film, this would absolutely walk off with it. We flit with bat-like swiftness from Tangier to Detroit and back to Tangier, as the story unfolds: the deadpan-funny tale of beautiful vampire creatures, exquisite aesthetes with fastidious tastes, razor-sharp canines and cheekbones, and long hair not dissimilar from that worn by Michael Sheen in the Twilight movies. They live their own crepuscular, eternal existence in the 21st century, having been born many centuries or millennia before.
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play Adam and Eve, and Jarmusch playfully allows us to assume that they are the first humans, before cancelling or modifying that assumption by bringing in Eve's rock-chick sister Ava, played with a swinging Larndarn accent by Mia Wasikowska. Adam lives in Detroit, Michigan, a reclusive rock star, who has built up a huge cult following. Adam is a bit snobbish about humans, whom he calls "zombies", but has one with whom he's friendly-ish: Ian (Anton Yelchin), who gets him all the obscure and expensive stuff he likes. But basically Adam spends his cash on vast amounts of blood from a nervous hospital doctor, played by Jeffrey Wright — the most relaxed and funniest performance. Meanwhile, his love Eve has been spending some time away from him in Tangier; she gets her blood from Christopher Marlowe, played by John Hurt. She doesn't appear to know any vampires who are not legendary figures. Why doesn't Christopher Marlowe get to look super-cool and young, incidentally? Adam persuades Eve to come to see him in Tangier, and the re-igniting of their eternal affair brings them to a crisis.
Adam lives in Detroit because of the musical connection, of course, but also because of its reputation as a ghost town, a bloodless city famously rendered undead by hard economic times: a lost world of wrecked and deserted buildings, and now the subject of hip "ruin porn" photography — and hip Adam loves to roam through the city streets among this eerie cultural wreckage, taking Eve with him. These are nice performances from Hiddlestone and Swinton, poised, if waxily self-conscious, although this is entirely appropriate for the characters, and Swinton's slight tendency to inert queenliness works well with Eve and her mysterious hauteur. Despite being lovers, they look more like well-born incestuous siblings, an impression which could, admittedly, just be due to the fact Adam was once acquainted with Byron.
Jarmusch's movies are a taste which it is possible to de-acquire and re-acquire. His last film The Limits of Control was dire, reeking with supercilious smugness. Only Lovers Left Alive is definitely a step back up, made with droll suavity — though sometimes quirkiness is still occasionally an alibi for lack of ideas, comic or otherwise. As with all his films, you have to let it grow on you. There's a very funny line about the 17th-century funeral music of William Lawes.
