Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Jim Jarmusch's crypto-vampire romance drifts between Detroit and Tangier, following Adam and Eve through centuries of marriage, vinyl records, and careful blood procurement. The film's social conscience comes from the director's cosmopolitan instincts, not from any program. Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi, and Yasmine Hamdan move through the story as people who simply exist there, which is the most honest kind of international casting. Nobody announces them.

What the film declines to do is just as instructive. There is no queer reading to be had here; the central union is a heterosexual marriage older than most nations. Eve is the wiser, earthier partner, scolding Adam for squandering his remaining appetite for life, and that is a domestic dynamic, not a gendered argument. The non-white characters carry no racial commentary. The leads are styled as gaunt, glamorous aesthetes, so the body is a costume, not a cause. Adam's suicidal despair is played as existential melancholy, never named, never diagnosed, never affirmed. It is a mood, not a condition.

Modern unease does seep in at the edges. Human blood is contaminated, so the vampires depend on scarce "good stuff," a faint ecological dread that never hardens into a thesis. Adam sneers at the "zombies," his word for the corrupt and foolish masses, though his contempt is aesthetic and romantic, not economic. The film's boldest invention is historical: Christopher Marlowe faked his death and quietly wrote Shakespeare. That is mischief, not revisionism with a grievance. Adam delivers a few weary laments about the state of things, then returns to his lute. The film offers atmosphere, allusion, and an oud at midnight. It ends with fangs out, and no lesson.