Mother daughter blood types

Byzantium begins with Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) writing the words “The End.” But for her there is no end. She turned revenant, or vampire, or soucriant—her preferred term, derived from Caribbean folklore—some 200 years ago, and is thus immortal, more or less, cursed to remain forever 16, forever on the cusp of womanhood. A natural storyteller in a film about storytelling, Eleanor is always writing her biography, throwing the pages to the wind, and beginning again. Sometimes a stray page will find itself in the hands of one curious enough to seek out its author. That’s a very dangerous curiosity to exhibit, but Byzantium, adapted by Moira Buffini from her play A Vampire Story, is in part a reminder that stories can be inherently dangerous things.

Director Neil Jordan’s second stab at a vampire story easily trumps its predecessor, 1994’s somewhat dull Interview With the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise. Working from Buffini’s far more cinematic script, Jordan strikes an appealing balance of narration and action, these two forces being embodied by his two protagonists, the melancholy, contemplative Eleanor, whose approach to satisfying her bloodlust typically puts her in the role of an angel of mercy, and Clara (Gemma Arterton), her beguiling, charismatic mother, a less discriminate killer, more pragmatic by both temperament and experience—she was forced into prostitution during the Napoleonic Wars and has kept it up as her go-to source of revenue ever since. Moving back and forth between past and present, between Eleanor’s voice-over narration and Clara’s adventures—the film opens with Clara in arresting lingerie giving a lap dance, busting a nose, being chased and sawing off someone’s head—Byzantium is a sensual gothic about the slippery frontier that separates appetite from need.

The title is drawn from the name of a dilapidated hotel located on a sumptuously gloomy English coast that Clara reopens for business as a brothel, though her enterprise is threatened once she begins to receive visits from some figures from her deep past. Ronan and Arterton are equally superb in their contrasting and complimentary roles, while Jordan deftly negotiates the story’s subtle shifts in tone, heightening atmosphere with weird storybook images of cabbage fields, dazzling scenes seen through mirrors and glass, lyrical spurts of blood, and a minimum of silly looking CG bats. 

             

Tamara Drewe: Vaguely feminist farmland farce hardly Hardy but not half-bad either

Based on Posey Simmonds’ graphic novel, itself a clever, loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd, Tamara Drewe is set largely in and around a rural Dorset writer’s colony, where a celebrated mystery novelist’s under-loved helpmeet (Tamsin Grieg) serves nummy snacks in dowdy turtlenecks, functions as an unacknowledged editor of sorts to her numerous and apparently mostly talentless residents, attempts to tolerate her husband’s philandering, and gradually kens on to the fact that the shlubby American Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) who keeps coming back to massage his writer’s block is probably falling hopelessly in love with her.

This is a rather sprawling ensemble comedy, so that’s not even the half of what’s going on in Moira Buffini’s adaptation—I haven’t yet introduced the titular character, who isn’t exactly the heroine of the piece but, most pleasingly embodied by Gemma Arterton, is quite obviously its star, a successful young journalist returning to her country home after years away with a new nose and a body to keep the cocks crowing night and day, making her grand appearance in ass-exposing cut-offs and a five-alarm red tank-top. Before we’re through she’ll have wittingly or unwittingly seduced a pretentious London rocker (Dominic Cooper), an even more pretentious middle-aged scribe (Roger Allam), and the local ex-con farm hunk (Luke Evans, sort of a less crazed-looking Michael Shannon) who opens the film shirtless and sweating against the setting sun in a tableau that could grace the cover of any six-dozen Harlequin Romances.

All this business—there’s still the mischievous teenage chorus to work in!—makes for a precarious balancing act. The multiple narratives are well-structured enough to keep us oriented, but from the get-go the overall tone slips into a decidedly broad brand of British comedy, replete with pissing cows and one guy eavesdropping while dropping a log, and Buffini’s dialogue is at times so on the nose—“She doesn’t need a writer; she needs a man!”—it’s nearly comical during those rare scenes that seem designed to be otherwise. The landscapes meanwhile are lovely, the story’s divided into seasons, and the occasional glimpse of London makes the big city seem dreary even for the rich. Director Stephen Frears seems at his best here when nurturing connections between his largely superb cast, as well as when emphasizing the script’s loving homage to bucolic life and sexually empowered women and its barely contained disdain for artsy retreats and emotionally immature men. Having said that, if a couple of the guys were more interesting, it may have elevated the film as a whole.