The Phoenician Scheme

Phoenician Blind

The Phoenician Scheme
Directed by Wes Anderson
Germany/USA 2025
Indian Paintbrush
UK Cinema Release Print

Well, you know more or less what you are getting when you go to see a Wes Anderson movie and I’m very happy to report back that, yes, it’s yet another masterpiece which, in a few moments, actually had me laughing out loud... which I don’t usually do, even with comedies. It just happens that in this case, The Phoenician Scheme has a gradual build up where the absurdist situations and dead pan delivery of the various characters becomes suddenly joyful in the manner of the director’s previous movies.

Some of the usual suspects make up the cast (and some newcomers) with the main protagonists of this being the fantastic Benicio Del Toro as wealthy businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda (obviously derived from Zsa-Zsa Gabor and Alexander Korda, I would say), his almost a nun, possible daughter and heir Liesl (played brilliantly by Mia Threapleton) and new tutor Bjorn, played by Michael Cera. Other big names include Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and, in the role of God, Bill Murray.

Now, I probably didn’t completely understand the plot because I don’t have a financial brain but it involves Korda, Liesl and Bjorn globetrotting to procure funding for Korda’s latest series of profitable building investments while trying to escape industrial espionage and almost daily assassination attempts. Korda has a reputation for being killed a lot and, in the few minutes he spends dead between each horrendous injury, he goes into monochrome visions of a trial in heaven... where information is sometimes imparted to him.

The film probably shouldn’t work as well as it does and, I’m sure for those people who are not an admirer of the directors rigidly controlled compositions (in this movie they’re in pretty much a locked in 1.33:1 aspect ratio throughout) and comedic literal dialogue exchanges, this would probably seem like an interminable experience. I absolutely loved it though and people who are into this director’s meticulous take on the details and minutia of various characters should have a blast with this one too.

Backed up by Alexandre Desplat’s wonderful score (which is outrageously not on a CD soundtrack album at time of writing), the film is fast paced and starts off literally with a bang, during the first of many assassination attempts made throughout the movie. Indeed the incredibly violent thing which happens in the top right corner of the screen in a shot in an aircraft, deliberately signalled to the audience by a sound that seems to come from the left, is a great tool for future scenes set in an identical aircraft (of which there are many as the characters travel from country to country)... as the audience will no doubt be worrying about just what is about to happen every time they hear that first sound when the composition of the shot is, more or less, the same.

The film has a pretty good ending too... I’m not sure if it completely ties into the biblical imagery littered throughout the movie but there’s certainly a form of redemption for one of the characters in this, it seemed to me. But, either way, The Phoenician Scheme sings along at around 100 minutes and, frankly, I would have liked to have been watching it for another couple of hours more. I’ll certainly be scooping up the Blu Ray of this one as soon as it gets a release and would wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of cinema. Wes Anderson makes such good movies. Bring on the next one.

Asteroid City

Casual Encounters
Of The Third Kind

Asteroid City
Directed by Wes Anderson
USA  2023 Indian Paintbrush
UK cinema release print

Warning: Light spoilers.

Asteroid City is the latest movie from Wes Anderson (co-written by Roman Coppola, the genius behind CQ) and, yeah, it’s certainly the best movie I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year. If you’re a lover of Wes Anderson’s exquisitely composed and controlled cinema, dealing with suppressed emotions and quirky themes in a lightly comedic but sometimes melancholic manner then, yeah, you’ll certainly know what to expect. Don’t particularly expect a story because, if there is one, it’s not immediately apparent and notions of what an individual may think of as the elements of a story would have to be brought into play and, you know, maybe argued about.

This film takes the form of documentary sections, filmed in black and white, of a performance of a playwright’s new play, Asteroid City. Most of the film is that play in full colour widescreen in an actual desert location that stands in for Asteroid City (not as a play, as such but, certainly being the play). This stuff makes up most of the footage with punctuations between acts and so on as the documentary footage in the form of... a play of the documentary footage... pops up to deliver narrative on events. However, sometimes the two formats bleed into each other, such as when the narrator played by Brian Cranston accidentally turns up on location and realises he’s not supposed to be here.

The film focuses... if a Wes Anderson film could be said to focus on any one character for any amount of time... on  Augie Steenbeck played by Jason Schwartzman, He hasn’t yet told his accompanying kids, who have arrived with him in Asteroid City so his son can receive a prize (being among some child inventors also receiving prizes for their startling achievements), that thier mother has recently died and is also accompanying them in the form of ashes in a Tupperware box. When his car breaks down, stranding them in the small town, along with various other characters played by the usual troop of people who want to work with Wes Anderson... such as Scarlet Johansson, Jeffrey Wright and Liev Schreiber... he calls his father-in-law, played by Tom Hanks, to come and collect the three daughters.

Soon after Hanks arrives, the small town has a ‘close encounter’ when an alien comes to borrow the asteroid which landed there millions of years ago and whisks it away in his spaceship. Naturally, the people in town are further delayed as the place is quarantined and the FBI move in to interrogate the many witnesses. And so on...

And it’s great. Some may find it a bit indulgent but, you know, that’s why you have auteur directors with very specific styles like Wes Anderson... if you like their work you want them to indulge and fully invest in their own quirkiness and that’s exactly what happens here. No Bill Murray in this one (he had Covid and had to be quickly replaced by Steve Carell) but most of the big stars you would expect to appear in a Wes Anderson movie... Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum etc etc... are all present and correct and all are absolutely marvellous, as you would expect with these kinds of highly stylised, somewhat deliberately muffled performances of dialogue. I shouldn’t have been surprised that ‘new to the Andersonville camp’ Tom Hanks was able to adjust his style of delivery to be absolutely perfect in this either... you get good actors and they deliver, simple as that.

And everything seems to be absolutely what you would expect from an Anderson movie, bordering on  cliché, almost. For example, Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film (which should be on a CD already... what’s wrong with you people?) is mixed heavily into the foreground and does exactly what you would expect from a score from this composer/director collaboration. Although the needle drop songs seemed to be more on point on this one rather than from very different styles. As such, however, there are no real surprises in the film other than the little moments (like Cranston’s character accidentally entering the wrong part of the movie). So, I knew that alien would be back to do one final thing and, yeah, it’s for the most Wes Andersonny purpose that the asteroid was temporarily absconded with.

All in all, I don’t understand some of the criticisms of this movie but, hey, I’m glad everyone is different. All I can say is, I loved Asteroid City and had a big smile on my face all the way through. Another masterpiece by one of my favourite living directors, for sure. 

PS. This 'city' is only a few structures and has a population of 87. Not sure why it's classified as a city.

The Batman

Knighthawks
And Pink Smoke

The Batman
USA  2022
Directed by Matt Reeves
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so despite some minor concerns, it seems the latest cinematic incarnation of the caped crusader, The Batman, is really not a bad film. It’s been compared to a horror movie in some respects but, it really isn’t... I suspect people are referring to the gruesome death traps in the movie which are similar in tone to the ones in the Saw franchise... which just goes to prove the point really. I’ve only ever seen the first Saw movie but, it’s totally not a horror film... it’s a thriller. And that’s what this new take on The Batman is... a thriller with the expected dark edges on show and the odd action sequence or three. Actually, the action sequences are kept to a minimum, it has to be said and, it’s a credit to the direction and editing of the piece, which is really a police procedural movie with Robert Pattinson’s take on Batman at its heart, that despite the overall lack of action the film never gets dull or draggy, at least on first watch. Perhaps because, if nothing else, the film is a big, eclectically post-modern melange of a movie which really isn’t subtle about hiding it’s various ‘influences’ throughout the picture.

Now, I don’t particularly connect with Robert Pattinson as an actor but, he really does very well here as a version of Batman torn from the comic book pages. Conversely, he doesn’t do a very good job at bringing the confident, playboy Bruce Wayne from the comics onto the screen but I’ll definitely cut him some slack here because a) I don’t think that’s his fault, its the way the character has been written here, as a damaged Bruce Wayne who has never gotten over the murder of his parents and b) it’s not a bad route to go in and Pattinson conjures the character as its supposed to work here pretty succinctly. And he’s not seen as Bruce Wayne too much anyway, mostly sticking with his Batman personae (and thankfully, his chin just about measures up).

He’s also surrounded by a tonne of great actors including such heavy weights as John Turturro as Carmine Falcone (yeah, their are some shout outs to the Batman comic book mini series The Long Halloween here), Zoë Kravitz playing Selina Kyle aka Catwoman (for the second time in her career as this character on the big screen), Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon and Paul Dano playing a very interesting version of The Riddler. About Dano... he’s not hamming it up for the majority of the movie but there is a point in at least one scene near the end where he definitely seems to be channeling the speech patterns of Frank Gorshin, who used ot play The Riddler in the 1966 TV show and movie. So that was nice because, it’s just such a grounded version of the character that I really wasn’t expecting it to come up but, he does go quite broad and large by the end. Also, the fact that certain modus operandi of both Riddler and Batman are identical, brings another question to the way their personalities work within society.

And I’m not going to talk about the plot of the movie at all, it’s not exactly original and you’ve seen it all before. This doesn’t invalidate it in any way and it’s very entertaining. And also very dark, not just in tone but, also, in that the majority of the film is set in darkness. There are very few daylight shots here. There’s also, thankfully, a realisation which seems to have been seeping through the current trend of comic book hero movies which this continues in that... you don’t have to show the origins of the character yet again with every new iteration, people know this stuff pretty well already. This is a Batman Year Two kind of story for sure.

Okay, I said the film is eclectic so, let me just talk you through a few things i noticed on my screening (I booked time off from work so I could go to a show with no Covid zombies in the audience and thankfully there were only three of us in total in the screening).

Okay, so there’s a nice shout out to Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks which really is in your face in its on-screen rendering. I literally groaned to myself when I saw it pop up on screen. Also, the Bruce Wayne voice over narration to the audience seems like it’s been ripped straight out of Travis Bickle’s lips from Taxi Driver. Or, if you want a DC equivalent analogy... like it’s been filtered through Rorschach from the Watchmen comic book (and subsequent movie, if memory serves).

Another big thing which hit me straight away was, well, Mat Reeves is obviously a Kurosawa fan (as are we all, I suspect). There’s a scene where Dano is in a prison cell and Pattinson is talking to him as The Riddler reveals his character’s motivation. The sequence is like a mini version of a scene in Kurosawa’s High And Low, where Toshiro Mifune is talking to the kidnapper in his cell, to find his motivation... only to find his motivation is him, perceived as an upper class and highly successful businessman who lives in the high ground in the city and seems to look down on/at the working classes. It’s a direct steal, I think but, since I love that movie with its pink smoke and rendition of the psyche of the villain, it’s a big nod which I appreciated.

Another thing is the vigilantes. You have two sets of a kind of gang or cult of vigilantes in this movie and at least one set, its revealed, are as much inspired by Batman (who is as yet un-named in this version of the franchise and is generally just known as Vengeance) as they are by the villain who inspires their dress sense. Much to Batman's horror. And comic book fans will probably realise straight away that both this idea of thuggish motivation and the idea of a band of vigilantes being manipulated are straight out of Frank Miller’s influential The Dark Knight Returns comic book Batman mini series from the mid-80s. It’s not the first time this issue has been tackled in a Batman movie either.

About those villains. Asides from Falcone, who is a mafia inspired villain from some of the later comics (like the aforementioned The Long Halloween, I think that was the first time I came across the character)... there are actually four characters in this movie which would qualify as ‘super-villains’ in the comic. I won’t name them all here but the way they are portrayed here is really grounded and much less over the top than their original inspirations. The costumes, if they have any at all, are not haute couture but just things a poor, working class criminal could put together on the sly with a low budget. These costumes do not look great but, that’s kind of the point and, especially where The Riddler is concerned, sometimes lends the character an air of authenticity or menace which might be undercut by something slicker. So that was a nice touch.

The film looks great in shades of browns and dark palettes and even though the action scenes are few and far between, it all comes together very well on a visual level. It sounds pretty great too. Michael Giacchino, who has a long standing work relationship with this director, delivers an incredible score which is really the only reason I was keen to catch this before it hit the home market. Like many of my friends, I’ve become jaded by the exposure the character of Batman has gotten over the last ten years or so. Warner Brothers seem to be taking a page out of Disney’s book and running their franchises into the ground, diluting them constantly to the point where a lot of people are losing interest... like their Marvel and Star Wars franchises. It’s become the same way with Batman and some of my friends who are usually first in line for this sort of thing can’t even be bothered to go out and see this one. But Giacchino’s score, which I bought on CD before seeing the film because I like the composer’s work in general, is really a great piece of art and it hooked me into seeing how the visuals would mesh with score and, yeah, he’s the only reason I gave this movie a shot so soon.

There’s a Nirvana song featured twice in the movie and it’s not a group I know much about. But it seems to me the main Batman theme (at it’s best when woven against the Catwoman leitmotif) is based on the baseline of that song. It’s all over the score... but it doesn’t bother me and, as I said, Giacchino does a great job here.

And that’s me done on The Batman. It’s very much an old school detective movie which looks at the method and reasoning behind the various murders and plots of the film’s primary villain rather than focusing too much on the comic book action scenes. It still definitely feels like a comic book but it’s not all just about the flashy gadgets and fist fights often associated with the character. So, yeah, a little different to the usual take and, that could have gone either way, truth be told but... I think it worked out rather well here and I suspect most fans of the source should appreciate this one. Maybe give this one a chance if you’re one of those suffering from bat fatigue, for sure.

The French Dispatch

French Letters

The French Dispatch
USA/Germany 2021
Directed by Wes Anderson

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

A new Wes Anderson movie is always a cause for celebration. He’s a director who, in my humble opinion, has been consistently stunning since fairly early on in his career and when I sat down to watch this, I was fully expecting this to be my favourite film of the year... which it was for the first third of the movie but, although this is indeed another of Anderson’s amazing, cinematic spectacles which once again remind people that you can shoot an intensely personal artistic vision and still turn it into a glorious epic in this kind of medium, I’d have to say the film came up just a little short of being movie of the year for me. But, hey, this would surely be in anybody’s top ten last year once they’ve seen this amazing, visual feast.

The film starts off with the death of the founder of the news magazine The French Dispatch, played by Bill Murray and, in typical Anderson style, the film is presented to the audience as articles in that magazine. The magazine is an American publication but based in France, in the small fictional town of Ennui (Ha! I love that Anderson can boldly get away with ridiculous jokes like this without losing credibility for his elaborately concocted fictions) and, in addition to Bill Murray, includes a whole host of A list actors in all kinds of roles, large and small, such as Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Henry Winkler (yes, The Fonz is back in a movie and doing an unbelievably good job as a perfect, understated Anderson character), Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan and Elisabeth Moss.

So a star studded cast and all caught in little pockets of the story but, as I said, the structure is that for the main sections sandwiched between the obituary and the End Note - Declines and Deaths section, the film is actually four ‘articles’ told from the point of view of one of the main writers of the magazine. So we have The Cycling Reporter from the Travel section (the briefest of the four main ‘articles’ told by Owen Wilson’s character) followed by Tilda Swinton of the Art And Artists section telling us about The Concrete Masterpiece (my favourite section of the movie), Frances McDormand’s Revisions To A Manifesto for the Politics/Poetry section and Jeffrey Wright, who seems to be channeling the performance style of Orson Welles (unless I’m missing a more literary allusion to the basis of his line delivery) to captivate the audience with the tale of The Private Dining Room Of The Police Commissioner for the Tastes And Smells section.

So, what we actually have, rather than one consistent linear narrative, is a medley or showcase of Wes Anderson short films... which is alright by me. The only weakness of the film is the inherent one of taking this format as the break from a single arc, meaning the audience will naturally compare and rate the various sections, as they would do in any kind of portmanteau movie. The ‘hit and miss’ nature of the strength of each episode being part of the territory. That being said, with Anderson being such a master of his craft now, it’s more of a ‘hit and not quite as much of a hit’ affair in terms of quality. In other words... there are no misses.

I’m not sure when each article is set but the death of the editor comes in 1975, with the publication of the last issue of The French Dispatch, which is shut down as part of the provision of the will. Whether these articles are all put together for this final issue or are a selection from various years is not something I could quite make out but, certainly, the Revisions To A Manifesto felt more 1960s to me than some of the other articles.

And once again, Anderson is mixing it up in terms of the different formats of the picture... a lot of it is black and white, some of it is in colour, most of it is in a 4:3 ratio with other moments in widescreen and even split screen where additions to the 4:3 ratio can be added as an appendix or reference to the content of the main shot mixing both colour and monotone simultaneously in one, nice sequence. This is not a division between different sections, more that every section contains all these kinds of treatments within the boundaries of its own ‘magazine article’. He also, uses a couple of animated cartoons to illustrate parts of some of these sections and, as quirky as that is... and also considering his past works where live action and animated styles have co-existed in the same picture (such as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou or The Grand Budapest Hotel)... I couldn’t help but think that in the second, cartoon animated car chase, the budgetary concerns of shooting such a section may also have come into play as to where best to unleash this technique.

The storytelling of each segment continues the style of the writer/director as sudden tangents to the storyline of each segment are often revealed to be Russian nesting dolls of ideas that ultimately grow from each other to add to the forward momentum of that particular arc.

There’s not much more for me to say on this one but I will reveal one delightful thing which, I suspect, would have had an audience composed of Jean Luc Godard and David Lynch howling with delight if such a situation were possible. When Tony Revolori (Zero from The Grand Budapest Hotel) is playing a young version of the imprisoned, psychotic, homicidal Moses Rosenthaler, he suddenly grows up into the later version of the artist, played by Benicio Del Toro. This is not done with a clever dissolve or other trickery but with the simple and ‘immersive defying’ moment of Revolori vacating his chair as Del Toro then sits in it, while taking his medallion off and putting it around Del Toros neck. One actor handing a character over to another, in fact. A truly nice touch and this one brought my personal house down, so to speak.

And that’s me done on this. If you like Anderson’s quirky, ‘catalogue and categorise’ style of narrative coupled by his squeaky clean shots, quirky physical space negotiations (such as when we track the progress of a character journeying up a tall building by his accelerated appearances at windows and balconies) and truly strong performances by actors investing in larger than life characters, then The French Dispatch should definitely top your list of ‘must see’ movies of 2021. And, of course, it’s all made more sweeter by the needledrop soundtrack selections punctuated by another of Alexandre Desplat’s masterpiece scores... this one very similar to his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel and yet another great triumph in this composer/director relationship. If not the best then, certainly, one of the best of last year.

Lady In The Water

Nymph or Mania?

Lady In The Water
USA 2006 Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Warner Brothers Blue Ray Zone B

Wow. This is a pretty cool movie.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have an ongoing and strange reaction to the films of M. Night Shyamalan. I try to see them because I always loved Unbreakable but, for the most part, I have found most of his films to be very obvious, unsurprising and disappointing. However, I almost always like the musical scores James Newton Howard composes for Shyamalan... a director who seems to bring out the absolute best in this composer. So I try to see these when I can.

Due to various issues with my life back in 2006, it wasn’t always easy to get to see the latest movies when they hit the cinema and, consequently, Lady In The Water was pretty much the only film by this director which I missed on the big screen. Because it got fairly bad word of mouth and was pretty much a box office failure, I could never really muster up the effort to get around to seeing this one. However, about a year ago I spotted a Blu Ray of the movie going for around £3 and figured I might as well finally get to it. After all, I really like the lead actor Paul Giamatti and, you know, there was that James Newton Howard score to hear within the context of the movie.

I was a little surprised, therefore, when... after a brief narration scene involving cartoon stick figures, giving us a potted background history of the fantasy creatures that are to be found in this tale... I found that the film has a charm and warmth far surpassing my expectations. Right from the outset, when we are introduced to the caretaker of a building, Cleveland Heep, played by Giamatti and the strange water nymph he finds in that building’s swimming pool... ‘Story’, played by Dallas Bryce Howard... I was hooked and wanting to find out just what was going to happen to these people.

Shyamalan’s almost invisible directing style provides us with a window on the many characters who inhabit Heep’s building, gradually introducing a truly amazing cast including Bob Balaban, Freddy Rodriguez, Jeffrey Wright and, of course, Shyamalan himself... who at this point in his career seemed to be writing himself bigger roles with every film he directed. As it happens, he’s pretty amazing in this too so... I can live with that.

Lady In The Water is based on a story M. Night Shyamalan made up to tell his children at bedtime and, as such, this film is a little more whimsical than you might expect from him... dealing, as it does, with water nymphs, their quest to ‘awaken’ a specific person in the world of man, the ferocious grass creatures who seek to stop this and kill said water nymphs and... other story elements which pull together as the film progresses. I don’t want to spoil this one for you so I’ll stop there with the plot details, suffice it to say that the film is about Heep and his quest to identify and slowly gather the necessary people from the tale so he can help Story fulfil her mission and return to her home while, at the same time, trying to protect her from her enemy. And it’s just great, in all honesty.

I’m not quite sure why this got such a bad reaction from people as it’s easily either my favourite or, perhaps, second favourite of this director’s works (although the score is Howard’s least interesting for Shyamalan, it has to be said). Maybe it’s because people are less able to buy into what amounts to almost a fairy tale of a story with adults fulfilling their specific purpose to make the laws of the fantasy world come to life. Or maybe it was just badly publicised by Warner Brothers... who knows? What I do know, though, is that I wish Shyamalan was still making films like this instead of some of the other territory he’s been moving into recently.

The really nice thing about this movie is that Bob Balaban’s character is a film and book critic. Therefore he knows everything about stories and Shyamalan is able to use this element he wrote into the character to slyly stick his tongue into his cheek by simultaneously having this guy deconstruct the elements of the film as they are playing out. It’s almost like he’s poking his tongue out at his critics (but not as a sign of affection in this case, as it might be considered by lovers) and saying to them, “Yeah, this movie is obvious and I know character A is bound to do this and character B will always do this but, actually, that’s not going to stop me from having my cake and eating it by having these characters do these things to move the story forward while I highlight that this is what they are doing anyway.” So it’s kind of cool and I think the last movie before this that I can remember pulling off such a level of self awareness while still using the clichéd elements of its genre rules to play out those very same things was the Stephen Sommers reboot of The Mummy series for Universal back in 1999. Lady In The Water has exactly the same kind of  level of reflexivity in it but it’s even more blatant and spelled out for the audience... and it still manages to get away with it.

Another thing I liked about this one is that there is no expectation of any kind of a twist ending like a great many of this director’s film have. That meant I could feel more relaxed watching it and, although the ending was pretty much a shoe in for the obvious conclusion, I really didn’t mind it and wasn’t in any way disappointed with the film’s denouement either. Which was nice.

All in all, I’d have to heftily recommend Lady In The Water to any of my friends who have a warm heart and like adult fairy tales. It is in no way deserving, in my opinion, of the rating it has on the famous Rotten Tomatoes website and I really don’t know why people are calling it contrived when it’s not something that the writer/director is really trying to hide about this work. So, if you’ve never seen an M. Night Shyamalan film and want to see a good one, check out this one because it’s an unquestionably warm and emotional movie. There aren’t that many of those being made these days, it would seem.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Drink Tilda Blood Runs Cold

Only Lovers Left Alive
2013 UK/Germany/France/Cyprus/USA
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Up until a few years ago I thought the modern vampire movie was gone as a legitimate form of artistic expression and figured it was going to stay dead for a while. Zombies had taken over and not many people were really doing too much interesting with the genre, or at least that’s what I thought. Now I’ve seen four really great contemporary vampire films in the space of as many years and Only Lovers Left Alive is definitely one of the greats (the other three being Let The Right One In, reviewed here, We Are The Night, reviewed here, and Byzantium, reviewed here).

This time, master movie maker Jim Jarmusch takes his turn to play with vampires. That is to say, he’s using vampires to bring out one of the broader themes of his body of work and using that as a backdrop to, basically, have some fun with the possibilities inherent in the genre. This is not to say it isn’t a strong genre piece, it’s definitely a “Vampire movie” with an upper case V... but the way he uses the genetic make up and popular tropes of this type of experience very much requires a certain level of familiarity from the audience.

And in this artistic choice, of course, Jarmusch is not alone among film-makers.

I’ve noticed that a fair few writers and directors are taking the ingredients of the myth of the vampire, using the bits which they want and throwing the other rules out, making oblique mention of the parts of the myth that they have discarded for each film, assuming the audience already knows what those rules are... and thereby freeing themselves up to get on with “the story”. Which is an excellent way of doing things, no doubt, for an older audience... but young people who are perhaps less equipped to be familiar with the ritualistic elements of the vampire movie/novel may find themselves in danger of being left out of the loop if filmmakers keep using this tactic. Although I’m sure there’s an argument that, by the time one is old enough to see movies like this, the knowledge is already there. Which, I guess, certainly holds up for now with contemporary audiences... but future generations may not be so fortunate with the opportunity, and willingness, to watch the vast back catalogue of vampire films made over the last 100 years or so... but that’s an argument for another time.

Jarmusch starts this film with a startling array of rich imagery, beginning with some titles, in a quite clichéd font to match the legacy of the subject matter, superimposed over a slow circling backdrop of stars. This immediately puts the viewer under a little bit of tension and ready to enter a more hypnagogic realm as the titles have the illusion of veering off on their own if you lose your concentration or glance away from them to another part of the screen. It’s quite hypnotic. The motion is continued post-credits, as the starry background is replaced by a vinyl record rotating on a turntable and we are introduced to the two main vampires of the piece, Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleton and Tilda Swinton respectively, in a series of shots which match the circling camera eye.

The swirling continues as they are intercut in their mutual slumber but, in different rooms and, once they get up and go about their business in two completely different places (Adam is sleeping in Detroit and Eve is sleeping in Tangiers) our perception of what we were just watching is completely overturned and we realise the dazzling camerawork and shifting distance of the main players from the lens is Jarmusch’s way of showing the mental connection between the vampires, even though they are separated by gazillions of miles, physically. Another series of shots of three of the main vampires drinking, which utilises a camera strapped to each actor I suspect, yields a similar sense of psychic camaraderie a little later into the running time of the film.

As Adam goes to get his blood supply from Dr. Watson (played by Jeffrey Wright) and gets some new guitars from his source, Ian (played by Anton Yelchin, the new Chekov in the Star Trek movies), Tilda Swinton’s Eve goes to see her vampire friend Marlow (yes, that Marlow, who wrote Faust and, in this version of celluloid reality, definitely wrote the entire output of William Shakespeare), as played by John Hurt, for her blood supply. The colours are really interesting as Jarmusch uses both fluid camerawork (and the occasional stint of handheld) to focus on what appear, at least to my eye, to be vibrant colours which have deliberately been toned down... so we get a kind of “filtered reality” feeling which is perhaps a visual rumination on the fact that, when you’re lived for as many centuries as the vampires characters in this film have, you get kind of jaded to things after a while.

The characters are set so you have Adam as a suicidal, Byronesque vampire archetype (something commented on quite blatantly by Eve during the course of the movie) who passes his time making great music which is never released and who gets a wooden bullet made so he can kill himself when necessary. And then you have the lightness and calm of the piece, his devoted wife who travels to Detroit to cheer him back up and act as the ying to his yang. The situations allow Jarmusch to comment and reflect upon the ideas made possible by the vampire myth in general, and since there are obviously only a few vampires here and there in this fantasy microcosm, it allows him to indulge on his kind of “last days of dying cultures rubbing together” theme, which he has dwelt on a few times, quite memorably in Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai. As he explores the possibilities of the genre, he gets to also invent some great responses to the nature of conversation between people who have been around this long and lived in this way... which is kinda the point I think.

A nice little idea, for instance, is the fact that the vampires tend to regard the general living human race as zombies and, when we look at our own culture’s current definition of all that means as defined by the slow, shuffling, brain dead legacy of the George A. Romero take on zombies from the 1960s and onwards, and then apply that conclusion to the supercharged senses of the vampires in this movie, that’s a pretty cool analogy to make. Cool being the thing here because, like a lot of Jarmusch movies, Only Lovers Left Alive is nothing if not extremely cool movie making.

It also gets allows Jarmusch an arena to get away with some cracking humour, which I think is where the bizarre accusations of pretension may have come from. The writing, if taken out of context, maybe does seem a little indulgent but, frankly, if you are decoding the scenes and the tone in which they are played, you’ll realise that a lot of the dialogue is high comedy. “You drank Ian!” for example, or my personal favourite moment, where I let out a large, inadvertent chuckle, as John Hurt pointed out that the old “zombie, Shakespeare” was a talentless hack.

However, a fourth vampire enters the picture, in the form of Mia Wasikowska playing Ava, and with her she leaves a wake of disruption which finds our main two protagonists fighting for their lives and, ultimately, reverting back to their behaviour from the 15th Century. Which is kind of an interesting angle for two characters such as these, who are lazing through life at their own pace and reflecting on the almost soporific nature of their existence.

I absolutely can’t reveal to you what happens by the end of the movie, but I will say that the pace is pleasant and leisurely, always fascinating, with stops to take in tranquil moments of beauty whenever those whims of fancy need to be indulged... all set to a fantastically simplistic, yet texturally rich, musical soundtrack which includes Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl in the mix too. And just when you think the pain of the reflection of the future survival of these vampires is about to take itself too seriously, it leads in to a final shot which is an absolutely delightful celebration of the vampire genre and which will, no doubt, please many people... just like it did me.

If you like Jim Jarmusch films in general then you’re not going to want to miss out on this genuine masterpiece. I’d place it up with my personal favourites of his ouevre like the aforementioned Ghost Dog and Down By Law (reviewed here). Similarly, if you like vampire cinema, he’s successfully made a film which both reflects on the genre rulebook while somehow still managing to keep it fresh and as alive as, it turns out, it always was. If you like works of art then, of course, you too will love this movie. If I’d had seen this movie last year, it may well have been my number one film, despite some strong opposition. My worst problem this year, however, is that it’s probably the best film I’ll see all year... and it’s only February.

Don’t miss out on this one, though, whatever you do. It’s one of those films that the cinema of reflection was invented for.