FILM IN REVIEW: NEW TRADITIONALISTS

1 8 3 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R Confined by what they see, Aquiline pedants treat the cart, As one of the relics of the heart. – Wallace Stevens ‘‘Can I get a download?’’ That question, coming in the midst of Jim Jarmusch’s exquisite and witty vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, is the movie’s version of a heresy. Only Lovers Left Alive allows some concessions to the digital age: smartphones, which make it easier to book tickets for the air voyages that must, by necessity, be undertaken at night. And new technology allows the vampire spouses – Adam (Tom Hiddleston), holed up making music in his decaying manse in decaying Detroit, and Eve (Tilda Swinton), swathed in the draperies and fineries of her pied-à-terre in one of the sinister and beckoning warrens of Tangier – to have face-to-face conversations over many miles. But that convenience has a twist: Adam has rigged it so that his beloved’s image transmits to him over a boxy old television screen. And even as he flirts with a death wish, he 1 8 4 T A Y L O R Y rejects the anonymity of mass production, preferring instead to contemplate the end of eternal life by means of a handmade wooden bullet. Mostly, the technology on hand in Only Lovers Left Alive is analog and retro: snarls of cables that Adam has rigged to provide power to his house; the speakers and classic guitars procured for him by Ian (the ingratiating Anton Yelchin), the good-natured gofer who serves the eccentric needs (instrumental, not chemical) of the scattered rock ’n’ roll tribes of Detroit who are carrying on against the swallowing darkness of what seems like an all-butdeserted city. When Eve packs to journey to her husband, her essential travel items are the books carefully selected from the piles in her home and crammed into a couple of suitcases. No Kindle for her. When Adam wants to hear a piece of music, he goes to his collection of vinyl. The movie’s opening shot tells it all: the stars of a velvety spinning cosmos dissolve into the revolving black grooves of a Wanda Jackson 45. Herein, Jarmusch, is telling us, lie the secrets of the universe. Only Lovers Left Alive is a meditation on the melancholy amusement of feeling yourself out of synch with the world yet in step with the cosmos. It’s the work of a filmmaker sloughing o√ the shallower aspects of the cool a√ect he has long cultivated to explore what matters to him. The great movies that are elegies for bygone eras – Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Hal Ashby’s Shampoo – all acknowledge that, no matter how sad it is that the eras they depict have vanished, their loss was inevitable. In Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch hasn’t abandoned irony, but he’s married it to genuine depth of feeling. As Arthur Penn did in Alice’s Restaurant, Jarmusch is making an elegy for the present, the one his movie takes place in. Or rather, he’s telling us that our era is sounding the death knell for so much that at one time seemed permanent. That’s a tricky position for a director who has always stood for deadpan cool. In Jarmusch’s early comedies, such as Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, the fashionably unfashionable music and thrift-store-chic clothing were the choices of characters who were down-and-outers as much by temperament as by circumstance . Their distance from mainstream culture was also unmis- F I L M I N R E V I E W 1 8 5 R takably a measure of Jarmusch’s own bohemian disdain for the merely trendy. You don’t walk around New York City with a cassette recorder playing Screaming Jay Hawkins pressed to your ear, as Ezster Balint does in Stranger Than Paradise, if you’re worried about fitting in. True hipsters don’t...