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Written by Pete Timmermann Wednesday, 10 July 2013 19:38

Vampire movies are so plentiful that they have to be really, really good to stand out—and Byzantium just isn’t that good.

 

 

 

In the opening minutes of Byzantium, Neil Jordan’s new film about a vampire mother and daughter, it crossed my mind that it felt like an Atom Egoyan movie. Egoyan is a very artistically gifted filmmaker who most of the time lends his talents to what are basically schlocky B-movies. This comparison of Byzantium to Egoyan’s films is actually more fruitful than I initially realized, as Jordan and Egoyan have a lot in common as directors: Both have one indisputable masterpiece behind them (Egoyan’s was The Sweet Hereafter in 1997; Jordan’s was The Crying Game in 1992); both are English speakers who do most of their work outside of the United States’ filmmaking cartel (Egoyan is Canadian; Jordan is Irish); and both seem like the type who would spend most of their time making Oscar-bait period pieces, but instead turn out stuff like Chloe and, well, Byzantium.

It doesn’t do Byzantium any favors that we’ve seen a lot of stuff in the vampire genre in recent years. Not that this trend hasn’t had its share of new classics (Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is close to the final word on the genre, as far as I’m concerned), but vampire movies are so plentiful that at this point they have to be really, really good to stand out for anyone but their core audience, and Byzantium just isn’t that good. In it, Gemma Arterton plays Clara, who is the mother of Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) and works as a prostitute to pay the bills for the family, which has the added benefit of turning up good people to suck the blood from when she feels the need. Also, her profession allows Arterton, who is only eight years older than Ronan in real life (and Ronan’s only 19), the opportunity to wear skimpy outfits while running from people quite often during the course of the film—the initial sight of this, just a couple of minutes in, is the first hint that this gorgeous production is going to go in the service of goofy genre trappings. Meanwhile, Eleanor is getting tired of living a life of lies: She only sucks the blood from people who are willing to euthanize themselves, and as a romantic interest in a young man begins to kindle, she yearns to tell him the truth of her past.

You know, I say that Byzantium is a schlocky movie, but really, Jordan’s skill as a director more or less keeps it from that realm. It’s worth noting here that this isn’t Jordan’s first foray into the vampire genre—that would be 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. As such, Byzantium would be a schlocky movie if anyone but Jordan (or maybe Egoyan) had directed it. The problem is, the more nonsensical and rough this type of movie is, the more fun they tend to be. (If you want to see what can be done with this type of material when a good-bad script is directed by a good-bad director whose inclinations actually suit the material, check out Jess Franco’s 1975 grindhouse classic Female Vampire.) | Pete Timmermann