Byzantium (2013)
"I am Eleanor Webb.
I throw my story to the wind, and never will I tell it more."
With a screenplay adapted by Moira Buffini from her play "A Vampire Story," Byzantium is Neil Jordan's second vampire movie, made nearly twenty years after Interview with the Vampire. Some critics felt that it was simply a gender-flipped version of Interview, which is true in some ways -- particularly in the relationship between its two vampire protagonists, Clara and her daughter Eleanor, though unlike Lestat and Louis, Eleanor is Clara's daughter by blood as well as by her conversion into a vampire.
Outwardly devil-may-care Clara (Gemma Arterton) and quiet, melancholy, red-hooded Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), live in relative poverty, as they have for the past two hundred years. Clara works as a stripper or as a prostitute, while Eleanor, being forever sixteen years old, attends school. They're forced to flee London when an agent of the Brotherhood, an order of vampire brethren, arrives in search of Eleanor -- an "abomination" in the eyes of the Brotherhood, for reasons we don't find out until later. Hitching rides along the coast and sleeping in cabbage patches, the two eventually make their way to a gloomy seaside town, where Clara takes up prostitution once again and encounters Noel (Danny Mays), a lonely man grieving the death of his mother. Well-intentioned Noel takes the two of them in, letting them live in his huge, dilapidated boarding house, Byzantium -- but it's only a matter of time before the Brotherhood comes looking once again.
Byzantium's vampires are much stranger than Interview's. Here, a vampire is made when a person ready to die travels to a cursed island, which houses a ruined shrine inhabited by an ancient...thing called the "Nameless Saint." They aren't affected by sunlight or crucifixes. They don't have fangs, either, instead using a long thumbnail to puncture a victim's vein and drink their blood. They do seem considerably stronger than the average human, as Clara routinely overpowers human men much larger than herself, and it's subtly implied that they require an invitation to come into a person's house. While they don't just immediately turn evil, the sort of person who becomes a vampire is invariably Byronic and conflicted in the first place. Clara, while ruthless in her own words, murders pimps and abusers, while Eleanor only feeds on those who are tired of living and give consent.
Most of the tension between Clara and Eleanor is parental. Eleanor wants a normal life, but when she strikes up an uneasy relationship with a sickly hotel busboy, Frank, her mother goes so far as to try to murder him in order to keep Eleanor dependent on her. Clara has her own troubled past, as she was born poor and spent her childhood collecting cockles on the shore before being taken away unceremoniously by the monstrous Captain Ruthven and forced into a life of prostitution, during which she gives birth to Eleanor. When Ruthven is offered a chance to join the Brotherhood, Clara, who is dying of tuberculosis, steals the map to the island and becomes a "soucriant" herself, setting the entire story in motion.
Byzantium is a much slower and even more brooding movie than Interview, whose vampires lived among the aristocracy. Here, their lives are in shambles, something reflected in their crumbling, nearly deserted environment. There's none of Interview's humor to be found here, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in a bleak movie where it would seem out of place. The damaged relationship between Clara and Eleanor over the course of two centuries is the heart of the movie, and Arterton and Ronan are both excellent as a pair of complicated women. The scenery is beautiful in its desolation. In many ways it's a very different movie than Jordan's previous venture into the subgenre, despite its apparent similarities, but it's no less worth watching for it.
Available On: Netflix.
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