54th Thessaloniki International Film Festival:
JIM JARMUSH opens it up
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE
Because the night belongs to lovers
Two vampires.
One is an underground musician,
hidden from all and
everything
in a dark Detroit.
The other one is a woman, living in Tangiers.
They will never die of old age.
They have seen number of cities and worlds...
...
and even though so inloved with each other,
they do not need to spend together
every second,
as they have the certainty
of seeing each other
for ever and
ever...
He is a bit distressed lately...
She
decides to meet him
and revive his spirit...
And everything would have been
quite fluid
if her younger sister wouldn’t have irrupted in her savage manner.
One could start
by
saying this is a vampires film,
and it truelly is one,
because:
a)
they feed with blood
b) they are and they aren’t dead
c) they live at night
So this film
is the reboot
that
vampires needed.
Only Lovers Left Alive is also
a film that speaks
about
things
more interesting than vampires,
among which:
a)
the feeling of freedom
and omniscience
and restlessness
that you have
when
exploring a city by night
b) the decay of matter
as the inevitable human way
towards THE END
c) The nostalgia
that is necessary
to any kind of
artistic creation,
and especially to music...
Tilda Swinton is Eve,
an
optimistic vampire
that loves litterature in all languages
and who dances
on forgotten classics
of the ‘60ies rock’n’roll.
She is wearing white
and has more
energy
when wandering at night t
han what i get
after 3 ristretti.
She answers to Adam’s
depression
with a sympathetic dose of “get over it”!!!
Tom Hiddleston is Adam,
a
depressed and melancolical vampire
who writes prog-rock.
He collects old guitars
and antique string
instruments,
Gretsch and Rickenbacker
and co.
Jim Jarmusch described his character
at the Press Conference
@ the 54th
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
as a “Hamlet as played by Syd Barrett”.
Adam loves Eve
and back
for centuries
(because with those names
they are also
obliged
to be some archetypes).
Detroit and Tangiers:
two cities with an imperial past,
vivid centres of
creation,
raining with cultural
and social diversity ...
And then ups, an economic crash,
a social movement,
an eyelash movement
long as a deceny,
...and Detroit and
Tangers become ruined,
two ghost cities,
empty,
uninhabited...
The vampires drive a vintage automobile
on the streets of Detroit
at night.
And Jarmusch reveals the beauty
of abandoned
cinema halls
turned into parking lots,
of exposed bricks and metal,
of
precarious buildings
on the verge of dying...
The two lovers hang out in Tangiers
(one of Jarmush’s favorite image at the same Press
Conference in Thessaloniki) transporting blood containers.
And Jarmusch quotes here
a scene from In the Mood For Love
(another film on the contrast
between
the permanence of memory
and the unbearable unpermanence of love,
and
about
wearing sunglasses at night)...
And suddenly
one feels in the cinema hall
that marrocoan smell of salt
in
the air of the night,
the sand in the wind
on the shore of the Mediterranean...
There is a sublime magic
in those ruins
and I am not descovering this now
and neither did Jarmusch,
or the
Romantic poets
that I love so much
and so do the two lovers...
Just think
how
it must have been
to watch the Punic Wars,
to play chess with Byron
or have a bad wine with Poe
and still
being here
to tell the story...
And then one understands
the weight of the passing of time...
The impression
of all those
useless places and things
that remain
after people desappear...
...and one understands
that the superiority
that one could have
after
having lived for centuries
is in fact a sort of crepuscular ennui,
so difficult
to overcome...
And yes,
all this existentialism
begins to weight a tone.
Only Lovers Left Alive
is a film where vampires take
themselves seriously,
where they are
hipsters
obsessed with vintage technology.
They have a taste
for the ruin-porn,
for
Orientalism,
they believe in the Shakespeare plot.
And now
... a not that old poem
of mine
that popped in my mind
while I was painfully
watching
this film:
...Our kiss is a secret handshake,
a password.
we love like spies,
like bruised fighters,
Like children building tree houses.
Our love is serious business...
There is no clean way to enter
the heavy machinery of the heart.
...Truth is:
My love for you is the only empire
I will ever build.
When it falls,
like all empires do,
my career in empire building
will be over.
I shall retreat to an island.
I shall hang out in libraries
and public parks.
I shall fold the clean clothes.
I shall do the dishes.
I shall never again dream
of having the whole world...
Only Lovers Left
Alive
is above all
a film about love
as resistence against
the
logorhee of time...
This poem says
that the absurd thing
we do in love
is to build an empire
around the one we love,
surrounding him/her
with glittery
extraordinary
and sanguineous things,
with time travels,
with spy
stories
and fantastic reincarnations...
But then one day
...love ends.
...Something changes.
...And the empire falls.
Because that’s what empires do.
And then that’s it....
...after the fall of the empire,
there is nothing else to
do...
Or just to clean the dishes...
In Jarmusch’s film
the
only lovers left alive
are not dead.
They are Adam and Eve,
those who destroyed Paradise on Earth, creators of
life on Earth.
Those who love each other
even when they mess out.
They are Adam and Eve who,
even though the engine broke
on their night
flight
and they missed the connection
in Madrid,
they still catch another flight
for seeing each other
and being together
other than on Skype
...(and yes
there are vampires using Skype).
Jarmush’s love
is about watching Empires fall
and then having the imagination
and the power
of projecting new ones.
Love is accepting
that sometimes
one thinks
he builds a cathedral
when in
fact
it is only
a bungalow.
Love is adapting
at living in the ruins
and may be even finding
they are
beautifull.
Love is resisting time,
cultivate a garden,
being surprised by the mystery
of the existence of mushrooms...
has the
typical Jarmusch humour,
his tastes,
his culture,
his love for music...
But in the
end,
except the feeling
that we had a coffee with Jarmush,
this film spins in the
void...
...in the
double circular
and repeated movement
of a vinyl ...
...and of the camera that travels
around, from above,
and then from closer and closer,
the sleepy/awaken bodies,
the distant/close bodies
of the two lovers,
timeless and ageless...
In that Jarmusch becomes hypnotic,
amused and
amusing.
Profoundly human.
...Only love
only these two lovers
stand,
transposed by the mesmerizing “Hal”
as sang by the Lebanese Yasmine Hamdan,
as
if
there was no tomorrow…
…but only TODAY…
again and again
for thousand
of years…
Equally
lyrical and pop,
Jim Jarmusch states once again that
”… we own the Night”...
…Because the night belongs to lovers…
Giulia Dobre
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