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Showing posts with label Tom Hiddleston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Hiddleston. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
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“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise deserves a top-class cinematic adaptation. Aside from having one of the all-time greatest opening lines, it's a marvellous feat of imagination. Ballard's setting is a futuristic tower block in which every human comfort can be found. Aside from chic, modernist living spaces: the building features a supermarket, a gym, a swimming pool, a school - almost as if you never have to leave.
This society-in-a-bottle quickly begins to disintegrate. Power cuts plague the lower floors, planting seeds of discontent. All too soon the residents of the building; lower, middle and upper, are engaged in literal class warfare. Veiled threats snowball into violence and suddenly everyone is giving into their primal urges; the elevator shafts and corridors of the high-rise becoming an orgy of mutilation, rape and murder.
Our protagonist is Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a recent arrival on the 25th floor. Recently bereaved, he desires insulation from the rest of the world and hopes to find it in the anonymity of the tower block. Detached, dispassionate and unfailingly polite, we learn about this world through his eyes. An educated middle class professional, he's able to move between the upper and lower class apartments, meeting both top-floor resident and reclusive architect of the building Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) and lowly second floor political agitant and documentary film-maker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans).
We first meet the building as a model of order and sanity but it's not long before the cracks begin to show. Whether it be a smashed bottle of wine falling from an upper deck, disagreements over blocked rubbish chutes and annoying power failures, the writing is on the wall. As if heeding the second law of thermodynamics, entropy kicks in and soon we're off into into dog-eating territory.
I recently took an architectural tour around the Barbican Estate in Central London and while watching this I couldn't help but remember what I'd learned. The magnificently realised tower in High-Rise is built to the same modernist aesthetics as the Barbican, with both the fictional Royal and real-life firm Chamberlin, Powell and Bon trying to achieve the same goal: a housing development that caters to the residents' every need.
Like Ballard's building, the Barbican Estate sports with libraries, shops, gardens, sports facilities, schools and so on. Both structures are carefully designed in order to impose a top-down social vision upon the residents; the desired endpoint a friendly, happy and cohesive community.
Both projects have proved to be failures; though the Barbican Estate never descended into murderous anarchy it ended up as an eerily quiet ghost town, the expected crowds populating the aerial walkways never materialising. Now the Barbican isn't sought after because of its strong communal bonds, but because it's an oasis of silence in Central London, where a contemporary Dr Laing can keep to himself in his soundproof box without having to deal with the smoky rumblings of the city that encircles him.
Ballard's vision of a building where each resident has their individuality sanded away until they fit into a pre-defined nook, and the failures that would inevitably arise from it, was prescient in 1975. But in 2015 we know that this style of living doesn't work - modern architects tend to work backwards, observing human behaviour than designing buildings around that. This makes High-Rise a prediction of a future that's already in the past, which inevitably saps a little venom from Ballard's scenario.
Still, by any standards this is a magnificent bit of cinema. After the excellent yet relatively small-scale productions of Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England, Wheatley clearly relishes working with a noticeably higher budget, going all out with production design and ambitious effects shots.
If I had to choose ten memorable shots from the London Film Festival, High-Rise would account for most of them. Whether it's the flesh being peeled from a skull rendered in anatomically precise detail, a super slow-motion shot of a body hitting a car bonnet or simply Hiddleston's face spattered with grey paint (as if he's merging with the building), the film lodges in the head: every frame carefully considered, every bit of scenery complementing the performances within, every semi-period costume patterned and coloured to perfection.
It's also design porn, so long as you have an appreciation of brutalism. The high rise might be a symbol of authoritarian control and class divide, but goddamn it's beautiful. The apartments have spires of naked concrete jutting through the middle, which feeds into a gently serrated exterior, crowned with a cantilevered set of balconies that scream confidence and permanence. Even the elegantly retro typefaces are carefully chosen, emulating the creme de la creme of 70s modernism.
Performance-wise, Hiddleston is excellent as a malleable man who's never entirely present. You sense that he's willing to be moulded by his environment, sacrificing his individuality to avoid personal responsibility. Also excellent is Luke Evans in a career best performance, brewing up a heady mix of rugby masculinity, fuzzy sideburns and testosterone. It's Jeremy Irons that get the best lines though, clearly loving saying killer lines like "This is my party, and I shall be the one who decides if someone gets lobotomised".
My only criticism is a slightly jumbled third act. Arguably this jagged narrative reflects the societal breakdown, but cross-cutting three or four narratives inevitably means a loss of focus, especially in comparison to the tightly-reined in opening third. I never lost the thread, but occasionally it's difficult to work out who's kidnapping whom, or which floor a certain character is on.
With each feature Ben Wheatley proves himself as one of the most exciting contemporary British directors. High-Rise, in keeping with his other work, is stylish, thoughtful, disturbing and darkly funny - and easily does justice to Ballard's vision. Whatever Wheatley cooks up next I'll be there opening night.
★★★★
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
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Please allow me to introduce Adam and Eve. They're people of wealth and taste and they've been around for a long, long year. Beautiful, aloof, dressed to the nines, concealing dispassionate eyes under designer sunglasses they embody the image anyone who's slid on a battered leather jacket, some skinny jeans, teased their hair and stepped out into a smoky night has ever imagined themselves to be. These are people of impeccable appetites, who know all the cool places to hang out and live a romantic midnight existence of baroque posing and slick music. And they're vampires. Of course they're vampires.
Jim Jarmusch is the doyen of celluloid valium, the undisputed modern master of wooziness and authentically weary cool-chic. From his earliest work he's zeroed on the lackadaisical outsider, making films about numb people dislocated from the world around them. Only Lovers Left Alive continues this fine tradition, presenting us with a pair of world-weary immortals who've seen and done it all and now exist an emotional, physical and temporal stasis.
As vampires go, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are relatively low-key. Their nights aren't spent with coffins, nighttime predation and seduction of the innocent; but rather with a monastic existence of music-making, reading and isolated contemplation. They need blood to get through the day, but given the preponderance of blood-based infections in the public they prefer to get it by bribing hospital orderlies or from other vampire friends who have a hook-up to "the good stuff".
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| Adam (Tom Hiddleston) |
Both characters wallow in decadent romanticism, but Adam has a doomed, depressed pallor. He spent the early 19th century hanging out with Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and their fixation on beautiful death apparently rubbed off on him. Adam sees the world as going rotten like a bad piece of fruit and filled with moronic, braying "zombies". So he purchases a wooden tipped bullet and spends his endless night contemplating offing himself. Eve, living in Tangiers, gets wind of this mood and decides to travel out to Detroit to pull Adam out of his suicidal funk.
Exploring the perspective of people literally older than the hills is fascinatingly imaginative territory and fertile dramatic soil. It's hard not get envious of immortality as the characters casually reminisce about happy memories of the great European plagues, the Tatar rebellion or the simple pleasure of seeing Eddie Cochran live. They mix a deadpan relatability with the alien; confidently predicting burning cities and water wars of the future, comforting themselves by imagining giant interstellar diamonds. Both are equally asexual androgynousness, with carved porcelain bodies and ruffled, untidy hair they look slightly dessicated, like walking Renaissance marbles.
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| Eve (Tilda Swinton) |
These are closed, withdrawn people, naturally wary after centuries of secrecy. As they give little away in dialogue, the production design has to do some heavy lifting. Each of their respective houses stuffed full to the brim of knick-knacks collected over centuries. Their styles are a stunning mix of 19th century louche, haute couture and punk rock - everything around them emanating a uniquely Jarmuschian sophistication and taste.
When you're picking apart a vampire movie what's important is to work out what this supernatural creature symbolises. The modern vampire is often a simple egotistical fantasy: chic, smart, beautiful. We want to be like them, we want to be them. This is vampire as symptom of modern sociopathy: granting the audience permission to fantasise about living one step up the food chain from 'the cattle'. Disturbingly, a critical element of this is the romanticisation of feeding upon other human beings to survive: the vampire as distillation of voracious capitalism.
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| I saw Caravaggio (1986) recently and Tilda Swinton looks EXACTLY the same. Is she actually a vampire or what? |
Only Lovers Left Alive is positively brimming over with this stuff. Adam and Eve's lifestyles can't help but appeal to our inner aesthete, Jarmusch's heady visuals doping us up real good, creating an opening for us to be seduced by his dissolute rock and roll vampires. This is where it gets smart. If the modern vampire is egoism made undead flesh, then the classical vampire is the parasitic, seducing 'other'. The epitome of this is Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, a seducing Satanic spider who draws the repressed women of Victorian England into a web of eroticism. Jarmusch's film does precisely the same thing, namely it tries it's best to get its fingers into our mental knickers, determinedly flirting with the part of us that daydreams about Nietzschean superman and our own innate exceptionalism.
As this power fantasy is acted out on centre stage, Jarmusch is busy fleshing out the margins of this world, balancing the coolness of the characters with a slow social collapse all around them. The Detroit scenes show modern America as ruin: rows of abandoned houses, theatres turned into car parks, noxious basement acid pools - everywhere rusting, defunct machinery. Even the people, who the vampires dismissively refer to as "zombies" are ruinous, their blood too contaminated to drink.
A clinical examination of the surface cool of our leads reveals a blank, empty void. They profess to be impossibly cultured and arty, but display a striking lack of passion about it. In a telling scene, a bored Adam picks up a violin and plays a virtuoso performance of Paganini's Caprice No. 5, it's technically stunning yet, like the artist playing it, cold and dead. Quickly it becomes apparent that culture is merely a way for these immortals to occupy their time rather than borne of joy in it. Even their professed immortal love for each other can be described as a sham; the two only companions by dint of their familiarity and history - ultimately they love only themselves, their similarity filling in for true love.
The one moment you see them express an emotion beyond blank indifference is when they're seeking blood or consuming it. It's here, in lovingly ecstatic close-up that the fangs finally come out and we finally, unambiguously see them as vampires. The way it's shot recalls the heroin bliss of Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, the characters sinking back into unpoised, instinctive joy. Vampire as drug addict is not a new idea, yet when mixed with the themes of social decay we reveal these beautiful, stylish angels as monstrous ticks pumping blood from the arse cheek of humanity. Constant references to a world on the brink of peril are sprinkled throughout the film, and what Only Lovers Left Alive shows us is that detached, ironic coolness is egotistical bullshit - beautiful immortality exposed as plaintive, weepy mental masturbation.
Adam and Eve stand in for every wealthy plutocrat safe behind a spiked fence, everyone hiding behind dark glasses in private member's lounge, every curled lip from behind the wheel of a Bentley, the grimace of mild annoyance flashed at you as pass through first class to the cheap seats with the rest of the cattle. Their parasitic accumulation of wealth achieved only by siphoning off the blood of those one step down the social ladder, never once suffering the consequences of living in a world they've left debased and ruined. Sure you might fantasise about joining them in their frozen, beautiful coolness, but Jarmusch's film shows the cost for this is your soul, relegating yourself to an endless purgatory devoid of excitement and joy, the only pleasure left the further accretion of pointless stuff and red, sticky capital.
That said, a beautiful critique of beauty is still bloody beautiful. Only Lovers Left Alive is a gorgeous piece of cinema from tip to toe, swaddled in a glorious soundtrack, boasting literally perfect casting and insanely gorgeous location shooting. To watch it is to be seduced, but in the most intelligent, expert manner. An instant cult classic, and one that takes a rightful place in the high pantheon of vampire cinema.
★★★★★
Only Lovers Left Alive is on general release from February 21st
Director: Jim Jarmusch Screenwriter: Jim Jarmusch Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt Runtime: 123 min
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