Jarmusch: Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

No contemporary director is quite so alive to the language of hip as Jim Jarmusch – he always seems to catch the right pose, the right inflection, at its most fleeting and effervescent. In recent years that has tended to make his films play as a catalogue of postures, a canon of cool, more interested in perfecting and refining a certain stylised ennui than in traditional narrative or character development. In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive culminates that trend – it is about a pair of aesthetes, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, who have read everything, seen everything and experienced everything that the Western Canon has to offer. The twist is that they are also vampires, meaning that Jarmusch can heighten their aesthetic exhaustion to a supernatural pitch – for them, being undead is mainly a matter of having nothing left to read, watch or experience; their aesthetic life has become purely gestural. In that sense, the film feels a bit like an anatomy of hipsterism, especially hipsterism’s hostility to novelty, its perpetual reminder that anything that seems new is already old, if only by a couple of moments. It also pinpoints the recent return to ambience in popular music as a kind of reflexive impotence in the face of that hostility – Hiddleston’s character has perfected a very particular anonymous drone rock that drifts in and out of the film, percolating its conversational loops and rhythms while overlaying everything with soft sombient feedback. And while there are certainly narrative interludes – most notably Hiddleston and Swinton’s anarchic niece, played by Mia Wasikowska, coming to stay – it is very much a study in conversational drone, with Jarmusch’s compositions reined in as never before, and his colour stock more or less reduced to the monochromatic palette of his earlier works, since it’s rare among recent vampire films in being exclusively shot at night. Even at its lushest moments, a black-and-white world undercuts everything – commuting between Detroit and Tangiers, the vampires prey on Jarmusch’s mise-en-scenes, absorbing or discarding everything that doesn’t conform to their pallid whiteness, until it’s like watching a film shot from the perspective of the Canon itself: a circulation, or conversation, in which there is no real permutation, just endless predation.