Jim Jarmusch
Only Lovers Left Alive

Jim Jarmusch is one of those directors with an unmistakable style, whose stories are always recognizable: seemingly plotless, with characters wandering through cities, encounters that touch them for a few minutes without stopping their journey, quick back-and-forth dialogues that refer to other stories, other experiences that could be part of the film itself. It's a rich tapestry of details, a cinema of little things, but in an erratic and underground key.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a metaphor itself of the concept of underground. Because what character can be more underground than a 21st-century vampire? A romantic scoundrel with suicidal tendencies, in the words of Christopher Marlowe, he too now a vampire living among the suggestive alleys of Tangier.

Adam and Eve are the two protagonists: two vampires married for centuries, living respectively in Detroit and Tangier. Rich, fascinating, erudite, elegant, mysterious, they are as radical chic as possible, yet fully represent the romantic and mysterious figure of the vampire present in the collective imagination, declined in a contemporary version. Adam is a musician, amusing himself in his suburban apartment, where he plays vintage guitars and synthesizers, avoids nocturnal company, and his sadness, which he attributes to the conditions the world is in because of the zombies, Eve attributes to his old acquaintances with Byron and Shelley. Accompanied by the music of Jozef Van Wissem, Adam and Eve move slowly, they dance, they meet: and the car speeding through the night along the roads of Detroit slightly recalls the 'old' Jarmusch, with characters certainly less noble proceeding along their way. Contemporary vampires and the world of music meet: the vampire is an underground musician, avoiding parties and the company of his peers (and others), halfway between eternal suffering and a sense of superiority.

Vampires are supernatural beings, who can share their diversity only with a few similar beings, and their dependency: blood, of course. And in Only Lovers Left Alive, this makes them more comparable to addicts, with an even stronger and impossible-to-satisfy dependency, in search of a dose to survive. Adam and Eve no longer kill humans to appease their appetites, they acquire blood (only of the highest quality) through indirect means. But Ava, Eve's sister, cannot easily control her thirst, despite, as her sister reminds her, it's dangerous to feed on whatever comes along, given the high concentration of contaminating substances present in the blood of strangers (especially those working in the music industry). A metaphor for unprotected relationships in a vampire-human key.

Without blood, even Adam and Eve can't survive long, but the two lovers don't want to die. On the streets of Tangier, they attend a wonderful performance by a local singer, and Adam reiterates the fundamental creed of the underground: let's hope she doesn't become famous, she's too good to be.

Jim Jarmusch has become famous, but his cinema always remains the emblem of underground American cinema. And in Only Lovers Left Alive, what he sketches is a tacitly ironic representation of two bohemians on the verge of decay. And please, don't call it horror.