Oppressed bloodsuckers

Oppressed bloodsuckers

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Oppressed bloodsuckers

Before the hot-blooded vampire craze of late, in 1994 Neil Jordan adapted Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire, a psycho-Gothic probe of vampirical solitude and the inexorable burden of immortality. That early film is set in New Orleans, with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as two sultry bloodsuckers living an aristocratic life through the centuries while dealing with the boredom, it must have been extreme boredom, of their deathlessness.

Byzantium

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arteton, Caleb Landry Jones, Sam Riley. Directed by Neil Jordan.

Now in the new film Byzantium, Jordan adapts a play by Moira Buffini, and the two female vampires at the centre of the story live their eternity in the British working-class milieu, sometimes at a desolate apartment block, and they fight a domestic mother-and-daughter fight while dealing with the well-groomed assassins sent by the male members of their clan. In the hieracy of bloodsuckers, females occupy the lowest strata _ a monster more monstrous than all.

The film makes clear that misogyny is rampant even in the vampire underworld. When at its best, Byzantium is a devilish mood piece, with its two vampire leads, Gemma Arteton as Clara and Saoirse Ronan as her daughter Eleanor, drifting along a cheerless seaside town trying to make ends meet (interestingly, they don't concern themselves much with the practicalities of finding blood, but more with earning upkeeps).

When not at top form, Byzantium feels like several movies vying for limited space: this is a coming-of-age story of Eleanor, a family drama, a Gothic thriller and pagan noir, and also a survival tale of the two women pushed around by society _ and by men.

That's why the film feels overlong, despite the atmospheric appeal and the hot-cold, push-pull magnetism of Clara and Eleanor. A lap dancer and later carnivorous mamasan, Clara vamps up the foggy landscape of the coastal town to which she's fled with her teen daughter.

Through a series of flashbacks, we slowly put together the 200-year-old voyage of the two vampires as Eleanor, a sensitive ghost-child nursing the classic angst of an immortal adolescent, writes down her life story and tears off the page and lets it fly off the wind. Eleanor _ played with delicate passion by Ronan _ also trumps the Twilight-style romance when she meets leukemia-stricken Frank (Caleb Landry Jones).

A bloodsucking girl and a blood-poisoned boy, if they end up together this couple would vanquish Edward and Bella's tasteless love and eternal constipation in a flash.

It's clear that Jordan, who made such gems as Mona Lisa and The Crying Game in the 80s and 90s, is more interested in the dramatic possibility of a vampire story than in the lore of vampirism (still, there's that stone shrine in the middle of a deserted island).

Clara and Eleanor, fangless but with preternaturally long nails, are not technically human, but it's the human relationship between them that the film is confident to show us. And Byzantium seems most comfortable, most intimate, when its two bright actresses give us just that.

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