Byzantium - British vampires are best

Man I love the modern age of film releasing.  I remember first seeing films in cinemas in the mid 1980s, where if you missed it on the big screen you would have to wait years to see the thing later on a fading VHS at my Nan's house (she had a video player - we didn't).  Not so these days; and so after feeling disappointed to miss out on seeing Byzantium in cinemas in the spring I had to wait out only the summer months before being able to catch up.  Billed in some places as the thinking viewer's alternative to the Twilight saga, Byzantium is a vampire story in which Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) play so-called Sucreants.  They live off human blood and have lived for more than 200 years each.  As we are introduced to them, we see them having to leave town quickly after a vampiric order they appear to be on the run from catches up with them.  Clara ruthlessly murders her vampiric pursuer before telling Eleanor to get her things and hitching a ride on to the first truck out of town.  Why are they on the run?  Well that's something that gets revealed slowly as the film unfolds.

While looking for an image to post in this review I stumbled across quite a few pictures of Gemma Arterton's heaving bosom on Google.  There's a lot of that in this film, but there's even more blood, pain and soul searching.  While Clara is happy to live a life of lies and deceit to stay one step of the order and keep her head and body in one piece, Eleanor is tired of living on the run and longs to tell her truth.  She writes her story into a diary and then throws the pages to the wind before anyone can read them.  The idea of vampirism is presented here as something of a sentence to endless purgatory, rather than a glamorous ticket to instant cool.  Clara survives the only way she knows how, which is to sell her body.  Eleanor preys on the aged, drinking the blood of men and women who are close to death and agree to her ending their suffering. When Clara takes advantage of a potential customer and shacks up in his dead mother's house, she sets up a brothel to make ends meet.  Meanwhile, a chance encounter between Eleanor and a local boy gives her an emotional outlet she has never had.

There are a couple of plot points that don't seem to make much sense.  Such as why Clara and Eleanor return to the town of Clara's upbringing if they're on the run?  Perhaps it was such a long time ago that it hardly seems to matter to them.  Then there is Eleanor's constant run-ins with local boy Frank.  She seems to conveniently bump into him all over the place.  Perhaps we can put that down to some sort of superior vampire sense that draws her to him?  Or something like that.  But the main one is why Eleanor is only getting bored by the ennui of being a sucreant now, why not 50 or 100 years ago?  Perhaps it's because they've returned to their home town?  Maybe.  The thing the film does well with its plot points is not to get bogged down in the whys and hows of vampirism.  When one of the vampires discovers that they've drunk the blood of someone with Leukaemia there is literally no hint that this might turn into a plot point, other than to identify a character who because of his cancer feels close to death and therefore drawn to vampirism.

So what I'm saying is that plot points aren't really what Byzantium is about.  It's a story about two women trying to independently survive in a world that doesn't want them while being pursued by a deeply misogynistic order obsessed with killing them.  It's a film that asks questions about the lies people tell and then have to live with in order to survive.  It's also a film that presents vampire mythology as it might appear in the real world, in which to become a vampire you have to run a terrifying trial of blood and then to maintain your secrecy you sometimes have to kill in cold blood.  Impressive then that the film succeeds in presenting both Eleanor and Clara as sympathetic characters, despite Clara acting out of desperate callousness on more than one occasion.

Byzantium is a very slow film, but it's an intense character drama with a smattering of extreme violence that does the things a vampire film should do - the film likely gets its 15 rating as much from its language and sex as its violence.  I can't understand why the film did so badly at UK cinemas.  I guess it was marketed at the Twilight crowd who were expecting something a little more light-hearted rather than a horror / thriller crowd who were happy to allow its slow-burning drama to play out.  I am recommending Byzantium.