“Only Lovers Left Alive” by Jim Jarmusch

Only Lovers Left Alive is a very poetic movie about books, music, art and vampires. The plot of the movie is quite simple, the events in it develop very slowly, because vampires who have lived for thousands of years are in no hurry to go anywhere.

This is more of a contemplative movie than a semantic one. You just have to watch it and enjoy the change of scenery and costumes of the characters.

The visuals of the movie are flawless. Speaking about flawlessness, I mean: at whatever moment you pause the movie, a perfectly calibrated artistic photo will be frozen on the screen. The oriental color of Tangier at night is replaced by the empty streets of dying Detroit.

The movie has an endless number of quotes and references. For example, the protagonist Adam is dressed in a medical coat with a badge that reads “Dr. Faustus” or “Dr. Killigari” (the protagonist of a little movie The Cabinet of Dr. Killigari).

Eve books a ticket on the name of Fibonacci. Fibonacci or Leonardo of Pisa, the first major mathematician of medieval Europe. Fibonacci himself often signed as Leonardo Bigollo, the word bigollo in Tuscan meaning “wanderer”. Perhaps this is the reason why Eva orders airline tickets with this surname as well.

Аnd then she uses the names Stephen Dedalus (one of the main characters of Ulysses) and Daisy Buchanan (the protagonist of The Great Gatsby). She befriends an old Englishman, Christopher Marlowe (a real historical character to whom, according to one conspiracy theory, is attributed the authorship of some of Shakespeare’s works).

In one of the books that Tilda Swinton’s character, Eve, reads before leaving for Detroit, there is a glimpse of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bas-relief adorning the Golden Gate of the Florence Baptistery on which God creates Eve.

Costume designer Bina Daigiler chose the outfits very carefully. The clothes had to show the eternal existence of the characters in the movie, their timelessness. The characters just wore what they liked over the years.

Costume designer Bina Daigeler purposely removed all the fashions from their closet, or fashion items from the right pieces. “They’re too snobby to be fashionable,” Jarmusch explains. The characters’ belongings are what they have “captured” with them from the places they’ve been and the times they’ve lived through.

“So the same jacket could be a little bit from the fifties, a little bit from the 1530s, a little bit from last season. Jim has a very keen eye, and he allowed himself to be dictatorial: he needed to make sure that the imperishability was felt in everything. Even in the smallest details of the makeup. The director wanted each piece of clothing to reference several eras at once.” said Daiguiler.