Past Misdeeds: Byzantium (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (based on a script by Moira Buffini that doesn’t feel stagy at all despite apparently being based on a stage play by the author) is the kind of film that really needs quite a different writer than I am to be properly appreciated. A shot-by-shot analysis combined with a deep thematic exploration seems rather appropriate, but that’s neither a thing I do, nor a thing I’m particularly good at, nor a thing I am even usually interested in.

What I can do, though, is to swoon a bit about what I think is the best film I’ve seen to have come out in 2013. I might throw around words like masterly, even. Now, before anyone thinks I have been struck by a case of director fandom, I’m not even a total admirer of the body of work of Neil Jordan, because for every properly brilliant movie he makes (like the Angela Carter adaptation The Company of Wolves, obviously), there’s a piece of self-important dross that just isn’t as clever as it thinks it is in his filmography. And don’t even get me started on the waste of properly sexy history that is The Borgias or his other vampire movie, the execrable Interview with the Vampire. This fluctuation between the horrible and the sublime makes the director much more difficult to adore than someone who makes mediocre and brilliant films in equal measure. On the plus side, one gets the feeling that Jordan’s failures have never been caused by a lack of ambition or an inability to change.

Be that as it may, with Byzantium, Jordan takes not a single false step throughout nearly two hours of film – and this is a film that really needs the time it takes – with moment of subtly breathtaking filmmaking followed by moment of subtly breathtaking filmmaking followed by moments of not at all subtle yet still breathtaking filmmaking. This is a film that not just oozes style in a very deliberate way, knows which shots to frame like a painting and which ones not to, builds a non-realist mood of contemporary grime with as sure a hand as it does provide some beautifully gothic excess; it is also a film that does nothing of this without a good reason. In fact, there’s a calm purpose to every shot and every camera movement, all of it not just made to impress with its beauty but always bearing the weight of character, theme, and mood without ever making it look like a weight.

At the very same time, Byzantium never uses its visual style to overwhelm its actors, always giving them as much space as they need. And, given how great Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton and their supporting cast are, one can’t help but imagine them paying the film’s care back in style. While some of the basic character set-up might seem a little obvious, even clichéd, on paper, the actors as well as the script provide subtlety and life quite on the level with what Jordan is doing around them, with so many suggestions of complexity I soon forgot that not every idea here is new to vampire media of any kind. It is, after all, not just the ideas which matter but also how you bring them together and execute them.

Thematically, Byzantium is as rich as its visuals and its acting are. This is, of course, in part a story about growing up given an ironic twist by the nature of its main characters, as well as a story about the need to change even when you are supposedly changeless. Yet there are also undercurrents of moral failures perpetuating themselves cyclically, of the impossibility to keep one’s hands clean when one wants to survive as a monster or as a human being until one doesn’t even want to keep one’s hands clean anymore, as well as an exploration of the lies people tell themselves about their natures to be able to live with themselves. There is, obviously, also a feminist and even a class-conscious aspect to a story that shows the vampires as a boy’s club that really doesn’t want any of those icky girls in them, particularly not ones from the lower classes. Which somewhat comes with the territory of a group whose members have been born centuries ago and clearly want and need to control their environment as far as possible. In this context, the film’s women can’t help but represent change and a different way of life – everything the male vampires fear – to them, quite independent of who these women actually are, and how much of the way they have to lead their lives is a survivor’s reaction to the pressures coming from the men around them. One of the really masterful aspects of the film is that it contains all this and more and never feels overloaded or as if it were trying too hard.

Another aspect of Byzantium I particularly admire is its willingness and ability to change from its semi-realist mode into Gothic fullness and back again without selling any of it short. In fact, the film achieves some of its greatest impact by the collision of the two modes, and by never quite keeping them apart for long, as if both ways at looking at the world were in the end just sides of the same coin.


Quite surprisingly in a film this unashamed of its Gothic melodrama, it also has a sense of humour about it all, a sense of humour which – again - never diminishes the rest of what’s going on, particularly since it has a wonderful grip on the closeness between humour and horror, and a cast willing and able to sell this, too.