Only Lovers Left Alive is certainly that. Swinton is Eve to Tom Hiddleston's Adam (yes!). The world's original lovers have endured the ages feeding on the blood of we humans (who they not so affectionately refer to as zombies), nourished by centuries of creative output, much of it their own. Eve resides in the yellow light of Tangiers, surrounded by a voluminous library of classic literature and the poetic wit of Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Adam has withdrawn to the ruinous outskirts of Detroit, where he records post-rock on classic guitars procured by his young go-between (Anton Yelchin).
Jarmusch tailors in Adam and Eve a pair of perfectly pitched mouthpieces. Their world-weary characters give him access to musical and literary in-jokes of every variety and allow him complete freedom to build an aesthetic parallel reality. Within this world, Adam and Eve stand apart. Apathetic, but for their artistic consumption and creation, they observe, detached, mournful and effortlessly cool (an aura exuded mainly by their detached mournfulness). Only the arrival of Eve's younger, zombie-tainted "sister", Ava (Mia Wasikowska) sparks them to engage.
Few film makers have chosen to work with vampires in such a bloodless manner. Interview with the Vampire, Neil Jordan's cinematic interpretation of Anne Rice's vampire novels, played with the ramifications of extended life, but Jarmusch, Swinton and Hiddleston go further. They anchor their interpretation of mythology's soulless undead by giving them more life than the rest of us. Adam may be tired of his existence (or tired of what we are doing with ours, more like) but the way their eyes light up when they come into contact with art, with art-science, with music and with love, marks them as the bearers of our collective souls. Jarmusch's vampires don't only feed from us, they feed us with their artistic inspiration.
To my mind, that puts them in the perfect position to comment on our world and the various crises we see fast approaching. Their commentary is off the cuff and veiled in disinterest, so it rings horrifyingly true. They touch on oil, famine and evolution, and their prognosis isn't pretty. To hear such prophetic dismissal pronounced amongst Detroit's modern wasteland and in the dark, otherworldly glow of Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is both marvellous and chilling. Add to that mix the lute driven atmospherics of Jozef van Wissem's score (bulked out by Jarmusch's own band, SQÜRL) and the effect is near ecstasy.
Only Lovers Left Alive is the ultimate comment on the cooler-than-thou set. Jarmusch celebrates them and trumps them all at once. It takes an old hand to tell 'em how it's done. It'll be a long time before we encounter another two creations as cool as his Adam and Eve. Take notes, hipsters...
★★★★☆
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