Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
A depressed musician reunites with his lover. However, their romance, already played over several centuries, is disrupted by the arrival of her uncontrollable younger sister.
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37 films that influenced Only Lovers Left Alive
What critics say influenced Only Lovers Left Alive
The movie is an original take on the vampire genre (although there’s a nightclub scene that nods in the direction of Tony Scott’s vamp-camp classic The Hunger).
The first movie to plow this turf — vampirism as a playground for attractive bohemians — was “The Hunger,” the 1983 Tony Scott film in which David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon went elegantly at each others’ throats.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
And it might be objected that the vampire-junkie parallel has already been done to (un)death, notably in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction .
The film is all the more impressive in that it is consciously put together out of the hoariest clichés - drinking blood, improbably extended life cycles, the connection (à la Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction ) between vampirism and the heroin lifestyle.
And surely Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction had said everything there was to say on the equation of vampirism and the junkie lifestyle?
Adam, a musician, is brought a set of guitars by his human friend, a scene visually reminiscent of Travis Bickle buying the guns from the black market salesman in Taxi Driver.
She’s not wrong – he’s recently procured a wooden bullet for himself from his miscellenia-dealer (Anton Yelchin, playing an alt-rock version of Steven Prince’s Taxi Driver character) – and so she jets off to Detroit to re-energize her beloved.
As the undead lovers, Ms. Swinton is a feline fashion layout, and Mr. Hiddleston, as a dead rock star who looks like Mick Jagger in Performance, is a bare-chested poster boy for bohemian allure.
Having lived in recent years as a cult rock musician, he’s gone into reclusion in what seems to be the last house standing in Detroit—a crumbling mansion stocked with sound equipment, a place so dark and cluttered in its bohemian splendor that, as rock-star retreats go, it makes Turner’s Notting Hill pad in Performance look like the winner of a Neatest Nest competition.
Style, color, throwaway incidents and music are essential, as in unaccountably maligned The Hunger, in oddball Cronos, in now-coming-into-its-own Ganja and Hess and its aka?s, even non-physical-bloodsuckers Performance .
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Actually it's a little closer to a couple of other downtown auteurs' vampire films, Abel Ferrera's "The Addiction" and, especially, Michael Almereyda's "Nadja," with all their thirsty hipsters looking for a fix.
(Untainted blood is rare commodity in the modern world — rather like virgin blood in Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula.)
The Thin Man with blood cocktails, an ode to hipsterism through the ages, a mainline shot of cool and a playful tribute to artistic fetishism, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive is an addictive mood and tone piece, a nocturnal reverie that incidentally celebrates a marriage that has lasted untold centuries.
Jarmusch’s film is sumptuously designed (you could spend your life happily rummaging through the historic bric-a-brac in Hiddleston’s home) and invested with elegiac asides, including the wonderful notion of vampires temporarily broken from their lament with a shot of decontaminated blood, filmed like the bored heroin addicts of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting enjoying a long overdue hit.
La sangre es un regreso eterno a aquello que no quieren ser; usando la misma técnica de Danny Boyle en Trainspotting (1996), estos vampiros parecieran â??viajarseâ?? cada que beben sangre, mostrando una sonrisa sardónica en sus rojos labios y largos colmillos que, finalmente, asoman peligrosos de sus bocas, prueba inequÃvoca e irrefrenable de su origen salvaje.
Ellos beben sangre y como Renton en Trainspotting (Reino Unido, 1996) el color de los labios les cambia, la sonrisa los domina y un pequeño viaje inicia para llevarlos hasta la salida del Sol.
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His nihilistic, deadpan quips hark back to Richard E Grant's marvellous turn as the caustic thespian in Withnail & I .
Only Lovers Left Alive is Jim Jarmusch’s dark and mournful version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.