Byzantium
(2012)
(SPOILERS) This is the first new Neil Jordan movie I've
caught in quite a while. (Oh wait, I saw The
Brave One…) He readily admits that Byzantium
distills a number of ideas and themes familiar to his work. That it does so
without feeling like a backwards glancing, late career retread suggests
there’s a lot of life in the old dog yet. It might be Jordan’s best film since
his '80s heyday.
There’s the storyteller architecture that is underpins The Company of Wolves. The ranging back
and forth through personal history comes from his other blood-sucking tale, Interview with a Vampire. And then
there’s the milieu (a gloomy, rainy seaside town), a reminder of Mona Lisa, which squarely sets a tone
redolent of his contemporary pictures rather than horror/fantasy tinged
projects.
The director is working from a script by Moira Buffini,
based on her play, but it all feels thoroughly Jordan. He’s clearly conscious
of the overstuffed vampire genre of recent years and, while there’s no danger
of Twilightness dawning over it,
certain aspects recall the acclaimed Let
the Right One In. Much as I liked that film, I found Byzantium more affecting. Perhaps because the characters are lent
such distinctive voices.
Jordan has more than successfully transposed the vampire
tale to a real world setting, complete with an intriguingly different
mythology. Staying are the immortality (of course), the drinking of blood (of
course), the loss of the soul (not addressed in any meaningful way, although
visualised with flair), the requirement to invite a creature of the night into
one’s abode (slightly more surprising) and the need for decapitations (well you
need a bit of bloody excess to remind you it’s a horror movie, don’t you?) But
gone are the fangs, allergy to daylight, garlic, crucifixes, siring of additions to the undead brood. The vampire’s tool of choice is now a retractable nail; neat and
precise.
More particularly, in contrast to the preponderance of the
genre, the focus is on two female characters; the 16-year-old Eleanor (Saoirse
Ronan) and her mother Clara (Gemma's Arterton). Posing as sisters, they live a life
on the move, pursued by at-first mysterious aggressors (Eleanor has remained
oblivious to their intentions) and trapped in a dead-end dependency cycle for
200 years. Clara maintains the career path she was cruelly introduced to during
the Napoleonic Wars, living by prostitution or, at best, lap dancing. She
provides for Eleanor, but their lives are a claustrophobic trap. Clara was
forced to become street smart very early on (and reminds us not a little of
Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa), while
Eleanor, whom she protected during her upbringing, is enabled to live the life
of mind; artistic and creative, she resents Clara’s carnal profession. The
terrors of patriarchy are central to Buffini’s story. It is a man (Johnny Lee
Miller’s captain) who ruins the lives of both protagonists, and it is also men
(except for Sam Riley’s more progressive – as Riley wryly puts it – vamp) who
would prevent them from accessing the elixir.
The precise nature of the shrine that offers this
immortality is not dwelt upon, but isn’t it more interesting that way? It has
clearly been around for millennia (Thure Lindhart’s Werner references the movie’s
title as a period through which he was living; a particularly nasty weapon he
wields is a souvenir from the Crusades). I’m a little cautious about the
accessibility of this magical site, since fishermen appear to be knocking about
on the shore close by (or perhaps I just missed something). What does seem
intentional is the parallel between this brotherhood and masonry; an exclusive
club of men with overtly misogynistic tendencies (“I hate these crying women”, says Werner disgustedly, having just
ended the life of one). Clara is pursued with a vengeance because she broke
their rules by inducting another woman. And she, entirely understandably, has
made it her mission “To curb the power of
men”. As she ends the life of a pimp on the beach, the imagery conjuring
that of a torrid tryst, she comments, “The
world will be more beautiful without you” but, unlike her daughter, there
is no beauty in her life.
Arterton is outstanding, and you get the sense of a
reluctant respect forming for her talents (in other words, the response was entirely
superficial initially, not always helped by some of the roles she chose; here
there’s the best of both worlds). As Clara, she makes no efforts to instill
sympathy in the character. She is who she is through harsh experience, and we
respect her even if we don’t necessarily like her. But part of this is down to
the perspective; we see her through Eleanor’s eyes, and her failings as a
mother and an empathic person are writ large; she is coarse, carnal,
manipulative and crude.
It is only when she is allowed to embark on her own
diverting story (a crucial part of their family history she never divulged to
Eleanor) that we fully understand her. Her scene with Tom Hollander’s teacher is
a tour de force, where her earthy pulchritude gives way to a much more
lingering grandeur. She returned to Elanor because as an immortal she could not
endure alone, but she is too late to save her daughter. If I have a slight
criticism, it’s that her cutting Eleanor loose at the end doesn’t play quite
right; it seems abrupt, as if Clara no longer has time for her daughter because
now she has a man in her life now. It may be what Eleanor wants and needs (and
is the natural parting of ways even for these unnatural creatures) but there’s
a beat or two missing.
Good as Arterton is, this is Ronan’s film all the way. It is
Eleanor’s wistful narration that sends us back into her and Clara's past (aside
from that one scene). She does a sterling job of conveying a girl who is both
200 years old and eternally 16. One might complain that she and her mother have
not grown over the centuries, but that is the whole point. There has been no
room to; they have been stuck in a holding pattern. What we do see is Eleanor’s curiously touching
moral philosophy. Her code for hunting her prey. The scenes where she picks and
then entreats her victims according to these principles are staged in such a
way as to make them almost comforting. She only goes after those whose time has
come (usually the elderly) and her acts may not exactly be mercy killings, but they
are mutually agreed. One might put this in the category of enchantments; we
hear her referred to as an angel as she enters a ward. But her gentleness also
derives from a mournful state (“Forgive
me for what I must do”). She is unable to live in the moment, something her
mother always makes a show of (although Clara is constantly living in the
future). The past weighs on her; “I remember
everything. It’s a burden”, and in her state she cannot progress. As she
tells Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), “Everything
outside of time is cold”.
Frank might be a little too obvious a character in
conception; while his sickly nature is vital to the mother and daughter finally
moving on, centring it on blood feels on-the-nose. It allows Jordan to stage
some wonderfully evocative moments (time slows down for Eleanor as Frank
bleeds, and she savours his crimson handkerchief, wearing the red hood we are
familiar with from The Company of Wolves;
but here she is the predator). Landry Jones can’t equal Ronan in terms of
screen presence either, and his mumbling delivery forced me to engage the
subtitles on more than one occasion. If Riley makes an effective counterweight
to Arterton in their few scenes together. Landry Jones is unable to do the same
over the course of many more.
It’s a nice touch that no one will believe Eleanor’s story;
not the boy who she most wants to (not at first, anyway) and not Morag the
teacher (Maria Doyle Kennedy) who is otherwise sympathetic. She has a fine
scene with Morag where she sadly informs her that the only way to prove her
story is over time; Eleanor will visit her in 20 years to do just that (as it
turns out, that’s not on the cards). But you
wouldn’t believe Eleanor. This is a world where vampires are part of the lore;
Jordan makes a point of showing her watching a Hammer Horror (in which a woman is about to be staked). Hollander’s
Kevin knows there is something different about her but he is unable to make the
leap to believing until circumstances force his neck (“It’s as if Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley had got together and had a
very strange little child”); this inner recognition is why he is so
dismissive of Frank’s blatantly invented ghost story but unnerved by Elanor’s
freeform reminiscence.
And the tale she has to tell unfolds at a measured but
compelling pace. It's a particular pleasure that the script doesn't succumb to
the rush to provide all the answers at once; they come in their own good time. At
one point Jordan even adopts a flashback within flashback, confident that we
will not be put off or confused. The imagery of the blood red waterfall is a
little too much (I was surprised it wasn’t added in post; it seems they used
food dyes), but everything else about the transformation process is striking
(are the flocking creatures bats?) The
idea of confronting one’s own self is a powerful one (just ask Luke Skywalker),
and Jordan has already skilfully introduced us to this idea when Eleanor first
realises she is back in a familiar place; she sees herself before she became a
vampire trailing obediently along the beach, and at one point her earlier self
looks round seemingly aware of her other’s presence (maybe at some point vampire
Eleanor will be called back to that shrine, to initially inflict death on her
human form – or is that a little circular and neat?)
Of which, the conclusion is perhaps a little too symmetrical; the bumps of
generational strife are ironed out such that both Eleanor and Clara have an
opportunity to move on. Jordan might also have reconsidered the decision to allow
two entirely different references to the title (the name of the hotel occupied
by a typecast Daniel Mays being the other). Nevertheless, he has imbured Byzantium with a melancholy and lyricism
that lingers in the mind; hopefully this signals a career resurgence for its
director.
****
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