Movie reviews

Byzantium and the cost of asking permission

Immortality gives parental authority an unreasonable extension. Byzantium finds its best tension in a young vampire's wish to have a life she can explain to somebody else.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

Immortality can keep a parent in charge for an unreasonable length of time. Byzantium gives that possibility a particularly sharp frustration. A young vampire wants an education and the freedom to explain herself. The centuries keep arriving, while permission remains somebody else's to grant. Eternal youth begins to resemble a very long wait outside the headteacher's office.

Neil Jordan's film follows Clara and Eleanor, played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, as they seek refuge in a worn seaside town. The Byzantium hotel offers shelter. Eleanor's connection with a local boy creates an opportunity to share a dangerous history. Being known by another person can disturb the arrangements keeping these women alive.

Two hundred years of asking

In his Slant interview, Jordan singles out Eleanor's repeated wish to go to school, alongside her desire to explain herself to the world. That ordinary request gives the vampire premise a stronger human scale. Education means contact with people outside the family and a future that might acquire a different shape. Keeping a daughter young also leaves the mother's authority with an alarming amount of time to become habitual.

That emphasis has a risk. Viewers may want more room for the mother's practical fears than a story about self-expression allows. Protection has consequences for both people. A contest between freedom and fussing would lose much of the discomfort.

The hotel keeps the wrong calendar

Production designer Simon Elliott describes the hotel as a midpoint between the nineteenth-century world the women came from and their contemporary surroundings. His account emphasizes pared-down, decayed environments across both periods. That continuity gives the design an argument to make. Different centuries can remain materially related, so moving through time offers the characters less of a clean break than the calendar promises.

The setting gives family problems a visible form. A refuge can keep an old arrangement intact. A place that allows survival may offer little encouragement to change, leaving departure and settlement equally difficult.

Let the landscape carry the excess

Then there is the blood-red waterfall. Jordan told Den of Geek that climbers introduced dye into a real waterfall, with some subsequent digital adjustment. Blood can occupy a whole landscape, enlarging the film's emotional register. The change of scale allows a bodily necessity to become an environment. It is a bold image to set beside the more confined question of what life these people can make together.

For an artist, the shift is worth examining. Change a familiar material's scale and consider how it alters the relationship between a figure and its surroundings.

Questions from the crypt

Why is Byzantium dated both 2012 and 2013?

Its festival history includes Toronto in 2012, while distributor materials also identify it with the 2013 release cycle. Those dates mark stages of the same film's premiere and release history.

Do I need to watch Interview with the Vampire first?

No earlier plot knowledge is needed. Jordan discusses a thematic kinship, while Byzantium has its own characters and comes from Moira Buffini's play and screenplay.

Was the red waterfall created entirely on a computer?

No. Jordan describes dye added to a real waterfall and acknowledges later digital adjustment. The practical basis is documented, while an entirely effects-free claim would overstate his account.

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