Jim Jarmusch's latest Only Lovers Left Alive takes the viewer on an abandoned romantic journey across oceans and over centuries. From the start of the feature the mood is established. A vinyl record is spinning and the camera swirls around in an overhead shot of the two leads in different locations. The tone is gothic and mysterious. Jarmusch brilliantly uses a deserted Detroit and the exotically dark Tangiers to magnify the vampire characters. Tom Hiddleston portrays Adam who is a rock musician and has the privilege of working with some of the finest musicians over the last three hundred years. However, he is a character whom is haunted and estranged from contemporary society. Jarmusch himself has been known to believe fervently that in modern day society, many people have absolutely no idea what is going on. Only Lovers Left Alive mirrors that ideology to T. To further establish the point Hiddleston continually refers to people as zombies. Tilda Swinton plays Eve who is a lover of the written word, music, and discovering the new over time. They both use leather gloves to keep their fingerprints from showing up in public. The amount of vampire feasting in the feature is at a bare minimum. Instead the two operate like drug addicts having to get a legal fix of methadone. Mia Wasikowska's character Ava is fantastic at being the wild card sister of Tilda. To watch her unravel the lifestyle of Tilda and Tom is truly hilarious. Mia represents a younger vampire who wants to behave wild and raise hell. While Tilda and Tom are very much academic intellectuals. The pair play chess, visit old architecture, and listen to music. Many of the couple's conversations are highly existential and deal with subjects like art, science, and literature. The irony of the film is that they are vampires. The usual tropes of vampires are usually horror and fantasy based. These are fully developed characters who breathe, almost like they have a birth defect.
In analyzing and comparing this picture to some of Jarmusch's other work it becomes apparent that the film most closely resembles two films, Dead Man in 1995 and most recently Limits of Control in 2009.
The frontier town of Machine in Dead Man is strange and foreboding in much the same way as Detroit. Dead Man has a major similarity to Only Lovers Left Alive, in which Jarmusch radically alters the genre. Dead Man takes the western and turns the genre into a surreal adventure story. Only Lovers Left Alive goes from being a horror film to a an academic, sociological, and romantic story. Similarly Limits of Control starring Isaach De Bankole is not a typical gangster film. The structure of that movie is quite nonlinear and the pacing is quite slow just like Only Lovers Left Alive. Jarmusch's pacing always stands out over the years because his characters never seem to be in a rush and watching the dialogue and interactions between them seems refreshingly organic.
In many ways the film could have started at any section and picked up somewhere else all bound together like a jigsaw puzzle like Pulp Fiction. The journeys of Jarmusch's last two features far exceed the destination. Sink your teeth into it.
