Clara (Gemma Arterton) walks the streets (in this case, the boardwalk of a British coastal town in the off-season) to pay the bills for herself and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), an eternal sensitive teen pouring out her soul in unread letters cast to the wind. Flashbacks tell their origins: a life of degradation at the hands of a British officer (a proudly debauched Jonny Lee Miller) in an 18th century culture of male power and class division, and a desperate attempt to escape a death sentence of disease through an ancient ritual reserved for a cabal of powerful men who ruthlessly guard the secret of immortality.
Byzantium is rich with metaphor and sexual politics, almost overwhelmingly so. It's a Gothic tale with a twist of conspiracy and a radically different take on vampirism as ancient earth force tightly controlled by a male cabal who treat the transformation like a birthright. Only men can birth eternals and Clara has broken the covenant by giving immortality to her dying daughter. The curse isn't eternity and bloodthirst, it is how the men of her society destroy women with impunity. Vampirism is patriarchy here and Clara is the accidental feminist and matriarch challenging their power and authority. Which makes her a target.
This take plays with tropes of the female vampire as icy seductress. Arterton's Clara plays up her sexuality in tight blouses and plunging necklines but that's all playing the part. She is more of a tigress protecting her cub from a hunting party of male predators and her victims are, for the most part, predators in their own right. Yet she continues to support them both through prostitution, whether out of habit, defiance, or simply because it allows her survive off the grid with easy access to potential victims.
Saoirse Ronan plays Eleanor as the classic lonely, withdrawn girl, locked in transition from girl to woman for a couple of centuries and disconnected from the world by order of her mother, who is determined to protect her from the corruption of the violent streets they are reduced to live among. Pale and thin, Ronan has the look of a fragile, haunted girl, the innocent sentenced to eternal life who only feeds on the willing like a melancholy angel of death. Clara's feeding can get a bit messy but Eleanor takes only by consent and leaves her victims in a state of peace. Sworn never to tell the truth, she slowly connects with a dying boy, Frank (Caleb Landry Jones, as pale and fragile as Ronan's Eleanor), but he takes her story of living with vampires as a metaphor for abuse. Rather ironic in a film where practically everything is steeped in symbol and allegory except that moment of unvarnished (if poetically elevated) truth.
You won't find fangs or wooden stakes here (they draw blood with knife-like fingernails) and sunlight doesn't sear the flesh. They can walk in the daylight but they choose the night, and not only because the darkness makes for a more thematically fitting and visually entrancing atmosphere. It's easier to hide and to hunt in the shadows. Jordan creates his own ritual, notably the transformation as sacrificial offering to the Earth itself. Played out on a forsaken, barren rock of an island, it is a stunning image that begins with a walk into a cave, explodes with a column of birds shooting up from the earth like a geyser, and is sealed in blood that cascades down the black rocks of the lonely island, as if the bleeding from a sacrifice on the altar of a primeval temple. That's a primordial image as resonant as any classic vampire movie and it gives the film a foundation stronger than the script's Masonic conspiracy of loyal eternals hunting down our heroines. (If souls are the cost of eternity, then men give them up willingly in this version.) For all its darkness (literally as well as figuratively) and blood, it's quite lyrical and evocative and elemental, and that dark beauty and emotional ferocity brings dimension to themes that could otherwise come off as a literary conceit. Vampirism is both a gift and a curse, a kind of priesthood bestowed by the Earth and corrupted by the men who would try to control it. These women offer an alternative moral approach.
The Blu-ray and DVD editions feature over an hour of interviews with director Neil Jordan, stars Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, and Calab Landry Jones, writer Moira Buffini, producers Stephen Woolly and Alan Moloney, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, stunt coordinator Donal O'Farrell, production designer Simon Elliott, and key makeup artist Lynn Johnston. The interviews are presented as a single running feature with title cards dividing it up by topic, breaking up and shuffling the individual interviews throughout the piece. It's an awkward presentation but it does offer some interesting insights from the collaborators.
By Sean Axmaker
