Tag: Byzantium

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews, Horror

Blu-ray: ‘Byzantium’

Written by Sean Axmaker December 21, 2013

Neil Jordan has long been captivated by the meeting of myth and magic and storytelling with the material world of love and sex and family, from the fairytale reworking of A Company of Wolves through the folktale on the Irish coast in Ondine. Byzantium, based on a play by Moira Buffin, is his second take on the vampire legend and this one is far less traditional than Interview with a Vampire. There is blood, of course, and there is sex, but it’s less about eros than survival as an eternal in a mortal world, and as woman who dares claim the rights reserved by a cabal of men.

Clara (Gemma Arterton) walks the streets (in this case, the boardwalk of a British coastal town in the off-season) to pay the bills for herself and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), an eternal sensitive teen pouring out her soul in unread letters cast to the wind. Flashbacks tell their origins: a life of degradation at the hands of a British officer (a proudly debauched Jonny Lee Miller) in an 18th century culture of male power and class division, and a desperate attempt to escape a death sentence of disease through an ancient ritual reserved for a cabal of powerful men who ruthlessly guard the secret of immortality.

Byzantium is rich with metaphor and sexual politics, almost overwhelmingly so. It’s a Gothic tale with a twist of conspiracy and a radically different take on vampirism as ancient earth force tightly controlled by a male cabal who treat the transformation like a birthright.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

Videophiled: The Blood of ‘Byzantium,’ the Dreams of ‘Tabu’

Written by Sean Axmaker October 30, 2013

The timing of Byzantium (IFC, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, VOD), arriving two days before Halloween, is not coincidence, but Neil Jordan’s take on the vampire genre (from a play by Moira Buffin) is not a traditional horror film. There is blood, of course, and there is sex, but it’s less eros and more survival here, with Clara (Gemma Arterton) walking the streets (on in this case, the boardwalk of a British coastal town in the off-season) to pay the bills for herself and her daughter Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), an eternal sensitive teen pouring out her soul in unread letters cast to the wind. It’s a Gothic tale with a twist of conspiracy and a radically different take on vampirism as ancient earth force tightly controlled by a male cabal who treat the transformation like a patriarchal right. Only men can birth eternals and Clara has broken the covenant by giving immortality to her dying daughter. Which makes her a target.

Jordan keeps returning to themes of fairy tale and myth and Byzantium is rich with metaphor and sexual politics, almost overwhelmingly so. Set in a seedy coastal town, where Clara has dragged Eleanor after escaping an assassin, and peppered with flashbacks to a life of degradation at the hands of a British officer (a proudly debauched Jonny Lee Miller), it plays with tropes of the female vampire as icy seductress. Clara is more of a tigress protecting her cub from a hunting party of male predators and her victims are, for the most part, predators in their own right while Eleanor, locked in transition from girl to woman for a couple of centuries, is the eternal innocent who only feeds on the willing like a melancholy angel of death. Clara’s feeding can get a bit messy but Eleanor takes only by consent and leaves them in a state of peace.

You won’t find fangs or wooden stakes here (they draw blood with knife-like fingernails) and sunlight doesn’t sear the flesh. Jordan creates his own rituals, notably the transformation as sacrificial offering to the Earth itself that is sealed in blood running over the black rocks of a forsaken island off Britain. That’s a primordial image as resonant as any classic vampire movie and it gives the film a foundation stronger than the script’s Masonic conspiracy of loyal eternals hunting down our heroines. (If souls are the cost of eternity, then men give them up willingly to the cabal in this version.) For all its darkness (literally as well as figuratively) and blood, it’s quite lyrical and evocative and elemental. Vampirism is both a gift and a curse, a kind of priesthood bestowed by the Earth and corrupted by the men who would try to control it. These women offer an alternative moral approach. The discs features interviews.

Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (Kino Lorber, DVD), not to be confused with Murnau classic, almost defies description. It’s a film split in two parts, the first half set in present-day Lisbon where middle-aged Pilar (Teresa Madruga) falls into a routine that includes checking in on her elderly, deteriorating upstairs neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral). She calls for a Mr. Ventura as she dies and, as he tells Pilar the story of their past in colonial Africa of the early 1960s, “Paradise Lost” shifts back to “Paradise,” a dream-like remembrance told in voice-over. There no dialogue in this impressionistic recall of a lugubrious life out of time where days run into months without a change in routines or even weather, but ambient sound (and a soundtrack including Portuguese takes on Phil Spector music) adds to the spell this poetic picture casts.

Continue reading at Cinephiled

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Slouching toward ‘Byzantium’

Written by Kathleen Murphy June 25, 2013

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

—William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

Why is Neil Jordan’s latest vampire film titled Byzantium? To be sure, that’s the name of the shabby hotel where Clara and Eleanor, his downscale daughters of darkness, take refuge, and a vampire hitman does brandish a sword he claims he looted from Byzantium during the Crusades. Does Moira Buffini reference the legendary city in her play A Vampire Story, which she adapted for the film? Could be, but I’d lay odds that the title is Neil Jordan’s contribution, and that the boy from County Sligo—W.B. Yeats’ old haunt—means his problematic meditation on the lives of the undead to lead us straight to “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” Yeats’ poems about age, time, eternity, and art.

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats, beset by age and love’s loss, imagined finding a way “out of nature” by becoming a form of art—say, a golden nightingale in fabled Byzantium that would sing of “what is past, or passing, or to come.” But once arrived in “Byzantium” (penned after “Sailing”), the poet discovers that perfect artifice disdains “all that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.” The city’s “blood-begotten spirits” suffer no passions and do not die; immortality simplifies all, for nothing changes or grows or decays. Yeats calls it “death-in-life and life-in-death,” the very state achieved by Jordan’s vampires in his own Byzantium.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Festivals, Film Reviews

SIFF 2013: ‘Byzantium’

Written by Robert C. Cumbow May 25, 2013

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed in Neil Jordan’s second coming to the vampire myth, Byzantium. Even seen solely as a vampire film Byzantium far surpasses Jordan’s 1994 Interview with the Vampire—and pretty much everything else in the genre. But while Jordan’s and scenarist Moira Buffini’s expansion of Buffini’s stage play A Vampire Story can be enjoyed as a straightforward—albeit narratively complex—vampire tale, it is much more. The familiar tropes of vampire lore (to which Irish folklore has contributed at least as much as middle-European) become, under Jordan’s skilled hand and eye, haunting visual metaphors for the tyranny of the body, the marginalization of the outsider, the economic suppression of Ireland, the subjection of women, and, most importantly, the means of rebellion against all of these. Vampires and whores, predators and victims—how can we tell the dancer from the dance?

In Byzantium, Jordan works wonders setting his outsiders apart from the environment they only half inhabit, while out-of-focus light sources dance in the background like leukocytes under a microscope. And when he isn’t creating conflicting layers with long lenses, he is choreographing motion on two or three planes of deep-focus activity. Background action cuts the vectors of foreground characters, which are themselves cut by the moving camera, keeping the viewing eye constantly alive, the viewing mind constantly questioning which movements are real and which are only suggested. One amazing shot, a lateral track of a beach conversation between two characters with a line of fishing boats moored behind them moves along the line of boats, gradually seeming to forget the characters altogether (and enabling us to do so as well), arriving at one boat boldly named “Our Lady,” then suddenly reverses its movement, as if the camera, Jordan’s eye, our eye, has gone too far, done too much, forgotten what it is about, and returns to the characters as if little or nothing had happened. It’s a delicious detail in an endlessly delicious movie, a celebration of color and light, a matrix of Irish anger and Irish love, with a satisfying, thrilling rightness about every move, gesture, and event. And if you remember that Bram Stoker was Irish, and that a guy named Yeats wrote poems about Irish rebellion and about a place called Byzantium—well, so much the better.