An aesthetic drama about vampires and a love that is stronger than death by an indie cinema classic.
Winner of the Soundtrack Award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Underground musician Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in half-empty Detroit, a symbol of the rise and fall of the industrial age, and tries not to be seen in public. He is disappointed in humanity and considering suicide. His lover, Eva (Tilda Swinton), a vampire like him, is worried about her partner and flies from Tangier to see him. Their idyll is disturbed by the arrival of her younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), because of whom they have to drop everything and leave to face the possibility of death.
The first digital film by Jim Jarmusch, the leading American independent director of the 1990s, is an elegiac farewell to the twentieth century. Everything here is suffused with an aloof melancholy for the past: from the material world (an endless number of stunning retro guitars, amps, and more) to cultural reminiscences on classic and modernist literature, which may even exceed the characters’ lines in the film. Minimalism is the main quality defining the beauty of this film, alongside a decadent dandyism. The main space is taken up by music, to the accompaniment of which the camera slowly admires the beautiful people and their delicate manners and style, which apply to every side of life. Only Lovers Left Alive is almost a ballet, a screen version of a trip or a poem in which music and rhythm play the lead role. Soundtracks were always an important and powerful aspect of Jarmusch’s films, but here we hear the director’s own music for the first time—meditative noise rock by his group SQÜRL, accompanied by Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem, who won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for this work. In this film Jarmusch contrasts «zombies, ” i.e., unfeeling humans, with lovers or those who have taste. And this film is for the latter.
The film will be shown in English, Turkish, Arabis, and French with Russian subtitles.
Only Lovers Left Alive
Director Jim Jarmusch
France, Germany, Greece, UK, 2013, 123 min. 16+