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| Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) in Only Lovers Left Alive. |
Oh so tragically hipster
By John Esther
The latest film by independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth; Dead Man and Broken Flowers), Only Lovers Left Alive tells the story of Adam (Tom Hiddleston), an eccentric musician living a life of exclusion in Detroit and his much older wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), a world weary woman hanging out in Tangiers. When Eve discovers Adam is sad, she gets on the next overnight flight to the United States and the two lovers once again rejoice, make love, listen to music of a bygone era and consume human blood together.
Yes, Adam and Eve are vampires. So is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the real writer of William Shakespeare’s works. But they are not your typical vampires. They read, they feel, they create and they are too civilized to roam the streets searching for victims to sick their fangs into. Besides human blood today is too polluted. Adam and Eve remain in the last remnants of paradise by purchasing the purest blood money can buy.
Layered with nuance, feeling, memory and metaphor, Only Lovers Left Alive is a mediation on the futile persistence of immortality, that lovers and friends will always come and go and what it means, in terms of privilege and power, to be a pureblood. Or it could just be Jarmusch’s attempt to bring to life the coolest couple of cinema ever. My Radiohead, are these vampires not hipsters to the nth power?
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