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Vampires lack bite

Tilda Swinton and John Hurt. Picture: Supplied

Film
Only Lovers Left Alive (M)
3 stars
Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt
Director Jim Jarmusch

REVIEW PIER LEACH

Director Jim Jarmusch breathes an opium cloud of cool over the vampire genre with his languorous love story Only Lovers Left Alive.

It's a typically laid-back affair from the director of Night on Earth, Coffee and Cigarettes and the superb Broken Flowers, about two centuries-old aesthetes dealing with life in the culturally compromised present.

Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are Jarmusch's perfectly cast, dubiously named couple Adam and Eve. They're an ultra- chilled-out bohemian pair who have been happily married for centuries but largely live apart - Eve in Tangier, where she hangs out with the playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), and Adam in an abandoned section of Detroit.

Adam is a reclusive musical genius who prefers to be alone with his instruments, rare pieces he acquires from Ian (Anton Yelchin), a human rock'n'roll kid who has no idea his strange friend has honed his skills over millennia and has occasionally let musicians like Schubert take credit for his work.

When Adam's brooding melancholy deepens and Eve has a foreboding dream about her hell-raising little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), she packs a suitcase full of books - Don Quixote, a Basquiat biography, Infinite Jest - and takes the night flight to join her husband.

It is a beautifully atmospheric nocturnal affair, filmed by Yorick Le Saux, in which not a great deal transpires.

Adam and Eve reminisce amusingly and nostalgically, name-dropping their famous friends through the centuries - Tesla, Einstein, Eddie Cochran, Byron - and lament their present-day cultural starvation at the hands of uncouth humans, whom they call zombies.

They hold out some hope in musos such as analogue maestro Jack White but for the most part it's cultural connoisseurs from the past they miss.

For sustenance, they feed sparingly from the blood bank (supplied by Jeffrey Wright) instead of sinking their fangs into potentially contaminated people - a practice that's "so 15th century".

What truly feeds freethinkers such as Adam and Eve are art, music, books and, as the title suggests, each other. They take their physical nourishment in tiny glasses, much less concerned with quantity than quality - holding out for "the good stuff" (O-negative) that washes over them like a narcotic.

Not so the childish Ava, a delightfully petulant Wasikowska, who takes the good stuff with the bad. Indeed, the only action that takes place is when she shows up and starts fraternising with the zombies.

In many ways what Jarmusch is lamenting is the loss of a more passionate, cultured time, before crass zombie behaviour took over (Los Angeles is "zombie central"). His film is actually thematically similar to Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which the director pines for a bygone era of much higher standards.

But what Anderson approaches with intricate, fast-paced physical and verbal comedy, Jarmusch muses from a much dreamier and cerebral position. And indeed, in White and the beautiful Lebanese singer Adam discovers in Tangier towards the end of the film, he finds reasons for his vampires to endure.

Jarmusch plants some deeply amusing lines in there which Swinton and Hiddleston deadpan like pros. Fans will revel in his droll, laid-back exercise in Gothic hipness, at the evocative soundtrack from composer Jozef van Wissem and Le Saux's lush visual serenity.

But its pacing makes it all a bit of a slog that becomes more interesting on reflection.

Adam and Eve would be the first to agree it is not for everyone. Its moody inertia will be too much for broader audiences - zombies perhaps - who will be more inclined to run screaming from Jarmusch's vampires into the sun.