Byzantium (2012)

 

Clara Webb is a vampire. Along with her daughter, Eleanor, Clara is on the run from the "Brethren", the autocratic and frankly rather misogynistic organisation that dictates the codes by which vampires must live. Never happy to have a woman among their number, the Brethren made Clara a fugitive outlaw after she turned Eleanor.  The fact that she did so to save her daughter's life makes no matter to them.

 

Clara makes her money as a sex-worker.  So, when she and Eleanor drift into a dilapidated coastal town and find lodgings at the "Byzantium Hotel", she soon seduces the lonely male owner and converts the place into a makeshift brothel. It's not a bad arrangement in many ways, providing income, security and a source of food.  But as always, it's imperative that they not be too successful, too noticeable, or too involved in the community.  After all, any of those things might reveal their location to the Brethren, whose ideas of how to deal with renegade vampires are very much of the "kill them all" persuasion.

Of course, avoiding all these things is easier said than done, especially when, like Eleanor, you've got the additional complication of having been stuck as a teenager for nearly 200 years.

 

Byzantium is directed by Neil Jordan, who - given he previously helmed 1994's Interview with a Vampire - is presumably no stranger to the blood-drinking genre.  However, the vampires here stray rather further from the classical model than those of the earlier film.  Byzantium's vampires are not troubled by sunlight, and appear in mirrors just like everybody else.  It's safe to say, in fact, that the whole drinking blood thing appears to be the only 'baked in' drawback of their undead state.  It's otherwise a pretty sweet deal: eternal youth, immunity to sickness, heightened physical abilities.

In fact, it's not hard to see why the Brethren want to keep vampire society so small and secretive; if the secret got out, everyone would want to be a vampire.  Which is presumably not sustainable, if human blood is actually a required part of their diet.  Of course, "keep our numbers small" is a very different thing "than be massively chauvinistic, class-obsessed jerks".  But then, these are men from the Napoleonic Wars, so alas massive chauvinism and inflated awareness of social class are probably to be expected.  Plus let's face it, it makes them very easy to dislike, which can be a useful trait in your villains.  And it's not like we as a species are yet past such regressive notions about people's worth.

But how is the movie as a work of entertainment?  Pretty good, overall.  It's certainly helped by strong casting: Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton are reliable as always in the central roles, and they are ably supported by a cast of capable, mostly British and Irish actors in the other roles.

The movie it not without its flaws, of course.  The rather long flashback to tell the tale of how Clara and Eleanor became vampires felt a bit unnecessarily indulgent to me, what with its host of CGI bats and literal waterfalls of blood. It is important in the film's narrative that Eleanor shares her history, as well as for her personal character arc; and some of these details do matter ... but it was just a bit too self-consciously gothic for my tastes.

That said, it does have lots of little touches that I really enjoyed.  For instance, the college lecturer who says: "Humans need to tell stories; it is how we understand the world".  I'm fully on-board with this; stories and how and why we tell them are a key part of the human experience.

It's also a nice touch that in the film, Eleanor's hand-written account of her life is all in the kind of beautiful copperplate that belongs to the era of her human life.