***
Neil Jordan is perhaps the one to
blame for the current interest in vampires as it was he who directed the 1994
vampire-flick ‘Interview with a Vampire’. Now, nearly ten years later, he
returns to the blood sucking Un-Dead with ‘Byzantium’ starring Gemma Arterton
and Saoirse Ronan as a mother and daughter team struggling to make ends meet in
the 21st Century. Living an almost nomadic lifestyle to avoid
detection, the pair move from place to place, Arterton’s Clara using her
impressive assets to support them and picking off abusive men to feed her
hunger. Ronan’s Eleanor, however, only feeds on those who are ready to die and
only really wants to tell her secret to someone so that the lying will stop.
Queue the arrival of the love-interest, Frank (Caleb Landry Jones, looking
fittingly unwell). However, it is not just their secret they must keep hidden,
as the pair are also being pursued by the vampire brotherhood.
The first problem is that
everyone is tired of vampire films, and ‘Byzantium’ doesn’t manage to do
anything remarkable, such as ‘Let the Right One In’, to set it apart from the
hundreds of other films with main characters similarly cursed. I suppose the
major difference here is that the vampires grow long thumb nails to pierce the
veins of their victims. Another problem is that Clara is deeply unlikeable.
Yes, she was bought into the sex-trade at an early age, and you could argue
that those she kills are a threat to weaker people, but everything she touches appears
to become cursed. When she and Eleanor move in with grief-stricken, clueless,
by genuinely pleasant Noel (Daniel Mays) at the Byzantium hotel, I couldn’t
help but utter a groan because you just know straight away that it won’t end
well for the poor chap. Noel is also quite a poorly drawn character – I accept
that he is lonely and in mourning but that hardly means he’ll allow a strange
woman to open up an illegal brothel in his hotel. Other poor characters include
the two teachers at the school Eleanor attends – in fact, that entire
narrative-thread is rather pointless and the time could have been given to the
backstory, set in the early 1800s, of how Clara and Eleanor came to be. This is
another issue with the film – it doesn’t know which story it is more interested
in; the story of Clara in the past, or the story of the duo in the modern day.
It would be wrong, however, to
say that I didn’t care about any of the characters. Ronan is excellent as the
bewildered Eleanor, raised to be humble, truthful and just by the carers at the
orphanage she grew up in. Frank, Eleanor’s lover, is also a well-drawn
individual. The slow, intimate scenes of the two young lovers getting to know
each other are probably some of the strongest of the film. The character I was
most intrigued by was Darvell, a member of the Brotherhood, played by the
ever-engaging Sam Riley. The trouble is, there is not enough of him in the
film! To say why I am interested in him would give too much away about the
film, but I did have questions. I also cannot deny that I had a feeling of
dread throughout, but overall the film has too much surface and too little
intrigue.
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