Byzantium | Little White Lies

Byzan­tium

31 May 2013 / Released: 31 May 2013

Words by Anton Bitel

Directed by Neil Jordan

Starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Riley, and Saoirse Ronan

Elegant woman in red dress gazing at her reflection in an ornate mirror, with a man seated in the background.
Elegant woman in red dress gazing at her reflection in an ornate mirror, with a man seated in the background.
4

Anticipation.

From the director of The Company of Wolves and The Butcher Boy.

3

Enjoyment.

There is the odd problem with pacing and Arterton’s overacting.

3

In Retrospect.

But Jordan has crafted a sophisticated Gothic narrative pitched between generic fantasy and more horrific realities.

Blood­suck­ers hit the beach in Neil Jordan’s woozy and extreme­ly vio­lent British noir.

My sto­ry can nev­er be told,” says 16-year-old Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) in voiceover at the begin­ning of Byzan­tium. There are hints right from the out­set that the sto­ry she goes on to tell may not be her own – much as direc­tor Neil Jor­dan (Inter­view with the Vam­pire) deliv­ers a new mon­ster mythos whose fan­g­less, light-lov­ing, long-nailed blood­suck­ers are vam­pires, but not as we know them.

There are many sto­ries in Jordan’s film. First there is the nar­ra­tive that, in her lone­li­ness, Eleanor repeat­ed­ly, com­pul­sive­ly writes down before scat­ter­ing the crum­pled pages to the wind like so many obscure Sibylline scraps.” In this, she and her 24-year-old moth­er Clara (Gem­ma Arter­ton) are an age­less vam­pir­ic team in flight from fel­low male sou­cri­ants” for the past two cen­turies and bur­dened as much by secre­cy as their lust for blood.

Eleanor’s elab­o­rate – indeed Byzan­tine – sto­ry con­tains oth­er sub-strands, nar­rat­ed in part by the 19th-cen­tu­ry mid­ship­man Darvell (Sam Riley) and his lib­er­tine cap­tain Ruthven (Jon­ny Lee Miller), and all trans­mit­ted to the sen­si­tive Eleanor by Clara, who is an invet­er­ate liar.

Then there is the sto­ry that Clara insists Eleanor tell oth­ers as part of the fugi­tive pair’s code of sur­vival. In this, Clara goes by the name Carmil­la (which she shares with the undead hero­ine of Sheri­dan Le Fanu’s 1872 goth­ic novel­la), the two women are sis­ters and Eleanor has spent some time in a care home.

What is clear is that both move togeth­er from place to place, with Clara sell­ing her­self or pimp­ing oth­ers to ensure Eleanor’s upkeep as they try to leave a trau­mat­ic past (and the odd corpse) behind. They have now been tak­en in by the kind­ly Noël (Daniel Mays), whose fad­ed guest­house (named Byzan­tium) the ever-enter­pris­ing Clara is quick to con­vert into a broth­el. In this sea­side town, Eleanor will meet, and fall for, the leukaemia-afflict­ed Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), final­ly entrust­ing her sto­ry to anoth­er in the hope that all these walls would come tum­bling down.”

It is entire­ly pos­si­ble to regard (and enjoy) Byzan­tium as a moody, melan­cholic mon­ster movie with a more adult roman­tic core than could ever be found in Twi­light. Yet strip the mon­sters away and what remains is an alle­go­ry for the undy­ing lega­cy of exploita­tion, abuse and oppres­sion per­pe­trat­ed upon women by the vices of patri­archy. Abstract away from the evoca­tive goth­ic detail­ings and you’re left with a con­tem­po­rary social real­ist sto­ry akin to Paul Andrew Williams’ 2006 film Lon­don To Brighton.

I get that you’re using the sto­ry to say bad things hap­pened,” Frank tells Eleanor, but why don’t you just tell the truth?” Truth, how­ev­er, comes in many forms and some­times the gener­ic hor­ror of vam­pires and dev­il­ry can be more palat­able than the real-world hor­rors of, say, child pros­ti­tu­tion, pre-teen preg­nan­cy and pae­dophile rings. After all, escapist fan­ta­sy always brings with it the impli­ca­tion of a real­i­ty to be escaped.

You might like