In the light of imperfect millennia, Adam and Eve wriggle their boredom in the silt of human inspiration. They roam the World, like the gray souls roam the Plain of Asphodels. An open-air coffin, the Earth exhales only the scent of existences carried out outside the Garden of Eden.
Undoubtedly
there is no better weapon against an era which works to perish you under the
technical injunction of ceaseless "updates" than to elaborate a
fiction deploying the splendours of the ageless, of the eternal present profiled
from century to century like a sumptuous routine. Adam and Eve are two jaded
rock star-like vampires. Hipsters therefore already existed in the Middle Ages. He, intoxicated by the Byronic
sickness of life, has shut himself up in a house in the decaying suburbs of
Detroit, working alone pieces of electric music that he especially does not
want to edit but that fan "rockers" pirate and broadcast. She is an
esthete capable of reading books in French, German or Japanese at full speed,
confined in an oriental pandemonium in Tangier that she leaves only to cross
the medina and join her friend and poet Christopher Marlowe at the café The
Thousand and One Nights- Marlowe who, contrary to what Wikipedia claims, did
not disappear on May 30, 1593. To physically
hold out, without jumping to the throats of their contemporaries whom they
contemplate from afar and name with a touch of disdain the "zombies",
these smart vampires have found quality blood dealers, tapped from the
transfusion reserves. surrounding hospitals. The scarlet brew is sipped from
port glasses or whiskey flasks, and instantly induces a radiant orgasm similar
to the flash of a heroin shoot.
The film opens
with the bodies of Adam and Eve stretched out their full length, arms
outstretched, on bed and sofa, in the same swooning, dreamy posture that Johnny
Depp did in the last sequences of Dead Man, when his character, William Blake,
lets himself drift towards death in his Indian sarcophagus boat. "Wherever
my eyes turn, wherever I look / I see looming here the dark rubble of my life
..." said the poet Cavafy, prisoner of the spells of Alexandria. Existence
adorned with the beauty of ruins and romantic nevermore is the paradox of those
vampires who, in fact, neither age nor need to fear finitude. Time is no longer
measured by the yardstick of an agonizing countdown, it spins on endlessly or
curves in a series of loops of cumulative and nonetheless devoid of any
purpose. The bourgeois logic of calculation, of predation is replaced by that
of letting live and contemplation.
Jim Jarmusch
invests the codes of fantastic cinema only to better reproduce the flavor of a
reality that always moves away. A late stroll among the fishing boats of
Tangier, a concert in a Detroit place, an industrial profile of the American
city with its vast empty avenues, a shady little theatre of Moroccan alleys
dotted with shadows… from one place to another, from one night to the next, each
sequence magnifies the visible world, restoring to it all its enigmas, its
silences, as if it were observed by the eyes of a panther on the lookout. The
nourishing substance of the blood and the regenerative capacity of the images
nourish the same desire for the absolute. In this, the cinema of Jim Jarmusch
joins those of Abel Ferrara (we obviously the masterpiece The Addiction, with
its New York vampires readers of Schopenhauer) and David Lynch.
The
narrative, reduced to its meanest expression, is subordinated to a vast work on
the mediumnic capacity of the sequences to absorb the mind of the spectator, to
summon at the bedside of his memory or in the cabinet of curiosities buried in
the depths of his most secret psyche of talismans, corpses, melodies laden with
meaning and shreds of phrases that no longer mean anything. If Only Lovers Left
Alive disturbs so much, it is because, effortlessly, at least apparently, it
brings out in the imaged and minimalist texture of its sequences the singular
hold of the nonexistent on existence.
Adam and Eve
are neither from heaven nor from hell, rather lost as we all are in limbo, that
is to say possessing the pious faculty of admiring objects (vintage guitars,
old grimoires), moments that are by nature perishable or fleeting and
nevertheless inconstant or distracted enough to mislead in the aristocratic
poses of aesthetes who don’t care about anything. Jim Jarmusch constantly plays
with his characters and their dandy fetish (the haughty way to put on
sunglasses at midnight). The film manages to tie together improbable threads,
combining the grandiose Baudelairian (the evocation of a stellar diamond
emitting the sound of a gong) and the mechanics of the box laughter of a
deranged sitcom. Living himself as a survivor and a ghost, Werther no wave
turned sexagenary goguenard, Jarmusch grants to the legion happy few the
inconsolations of a present too fruste the exile of an absolutely wonderful
film.
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