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. 

             

Hanna: wild thing runs fast

Our titular adolescent home-schooled superathlete (Saoirse Ronan) grows up near the North Pole receiving instruction in hunting and fighting by her survivalist dad with a past (Eric Bana). When she’s finally ready to leave their frozen nest she does so knowing that a certain nefarious CIA operative (Cate Blanchett) will instantly be out to kill dad and maybe do something worse to her: there are intimations that she’s got some sort of top-secret experimental juice in her genes. A genuine wild child whose knowledge of culture has been culled entirely from a slim encyclopedia but whose strength and agility is ninjalike, Hanna’s story slides between her discovering the world and her killing a whole lot of people in it. (Though, if it makes you feel better, she doesn’t seem to enjoy her displays of lethal child-violence nearly as much as Chloë Moretz does in Kick-Ass.)

Director Joe Wright reportedly inherited the project from Danny Boyle, to whom Hanna, with its pulsing chase narrative, techno-friendliness and air of childish awe, seems more naturally suited. But then again, Wright, who previously helmed Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, hasn’t really distinguished himself as being naturally suited for anything besides ultra-high production values, which he exploits very professionally (and I don’t use that word casually). Employing jump cuts, flashing lights and the Chemical Brothers, Wright seems eager to shake off the stateliness of his extant work, get the blood pumping, and start acting his age (he’s not yet 40). Some of this is pretty fun and intriguing, but it’s also uneven and confused, its sci-fi aspects are barely even glazed over, and I’m just not sure what to make it as a whole. I appreciate Wright’s willingness to eschew certain globalized thriller conventions (there are no titles announcing our current location being typed over establishing shots) and focus on sensation over story (a good thing since David Farr and Seth Lochhead’s sub-Bourne script is riddled with gaping holes: where did our snowy middle-of-nowhere forest-spawned Hanna learn to use handguns and personal computers anyway?), but if my praise feels miserly it’s just that Wright’s rebooted stylistics feel tacked on much of the time, more schematic than suasive. Bizarrely, Wright claims to be influenced here by David Lynch, while Hanna feels so much more like less trigger-happy (with regards to both guns and editing) Tony Scott.

But okay, I think I can spot the Lynch-pin. There are some roaming kooky villains on little Hanna’s trail. The sadistic leader (Tom Hollander, who it must be said really seems to having a great time) wears silly jumpsuits and does a little soft-shoe while interrogating an English family in a yard full of shipping containers, all very theatrical. His underlings are all skinheads, because apparently it’s easy as pie to find neo-Nazis just hanging around in North Africa, right? Does self-consciously quirky, menacing nonsense constitute a “Lynchian” touch? Perhaps if you don’t watch Lynch’s films very carefully. Or at all.