Neil Jordan
Byzantium

In recent years, vampire stories have definitely changed their target audience, forsaking the "horror" component in favor of more romantic aspects and a dark aesthetic that evidently resonate greatly with a young audience. We are talking about something that works at the box office, and even Jim Jarmusch ended up falling into it with "Only Lovers Left Alive". Typically, I steer clear of such films, but considering that Neil Jordan directed one of the most successful films in the genre in the nineties, namely "Interview With the Vampire", combined with my enduring appreciation for the director, I was nonetheless interested in watching his last film from 2012: "Byzantium".

Based on a theatrical play by Moira Buffini, the story is set in the present day in an unspecified location where we follow the lives of two women named Clara Webb and her daughter Eleanor (Gemma Aterton and the young and talented Saoirse Ronan). The two women are vampires, born at the start of the nineteenth century and condemned to eternal life. Clara has a domineering nature and prostitures herself to survive, choosing her victims (they obviously need blood to survive) with no particular scruples, while Eleanor leads a solitary life, constantly writing her memories that she then literally entrusts to the wind. In choosing her victims, she performs acts that can be defined as pity and mercy, gently accompanying mostly elderly people who choose to die deliberately to their deaths. Persecuted over the centuries by the "brotherhood," the two women have been moving continuously from place to place for two hundred years, until the day comes when Eleanor decides to free herself from the weight of this entire story, which she recounts in a long letter intercepted by their persecutors: at this point, the final showdown of a game that began 200 years earlier will be inevitable.

The film tells a story of mother and daughter in a very peculiar dimension: the most interesting aspect lies precisely in this bond and in how, despite 200 years of life, the former remained an unprepared young mother and the latter an adolescent. As if breaking or at least changing this bond were the only way, if nothing else, to grow. In this, eternal life becomes a kind of metaphor and an invitation to seek in change, the rupture, that push to renew one's existence. Otherwise, while the settings are successful (the interiors of the old "Byzantium" hotel are evocative), never descending into the overused lavishness of gothic settings, the story is, however, very weak and the dynamics of the relationship between the two women are addressed but resolved without allowing us to truly experience the developments of this process. Certainly far from the aforementioned "Interview With the Vampire" as a genre, as well as from the traditional recurring themes of vampire settings, "Byzantium" is a film that does not work and fails to develop in a convincing manner, and perhaps the biggest misstep of this great director. So far, it is his last film: I await his return because he certainly cannot end on this note.