Director: Neil Jordan
Talent: Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton, Jonny Lee Miller, Sam Riley
Release Date: 31st May 2013
Neil Jordan’s career as Ireland’s primo “crossover appeal” director owes a lot to his disconcerting use of fantasy tropes to engage critically (sometimes tangentially) with genre and contemporary reality ― Interview with the Vampire, Ondine, The Company of Wolves ― as well as a fascination with constructions of gender and sexuality that manifests itself subtly and overtly in his more trenchantly “realist” projects: The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Breakfast on Pluto, etc. Byzantium, which tells the story of Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) and Clara (Gemma Arterton), two vampires evading discovery in England’s coastal towns, supported financially by the latter’s engagements in sex work, would on the surface seem to be ripe ground for Jordan’s eerie but compassionate cinematic style, but the film suffers greatly in its execution from stage play to script (both written by Moira Buffini) to screen. Flitting between Edwardian England and the present day as Eleanor narrates her 200 year life story, Jordan has ample mythology and period significance to draw on visually, but never establishes a coherent sense of space and time, despite what is an essentially uncomplicated narrative framing device: why, for example, is Frank, Eleanor’s 2013 human love interest, consistently dressed like a 19th century pirate?
If small details disrupt the film’s verisimilitude, then a turgid script leaves its actors little to work with in the way of dialogue or characterisation. Arterton’s Clara feels consistently two-dimensional, equal parts overprotective mother-figure and saucy, Vaudevillian madam, with the patriarchal power structures affecting her and Eleanor’s living conditions only tantalisingly alluded to in speech towards the film’s closing. Ronan gives a capable and intermittently touching performance, but the film’s po-faced dramaturgy grates, and would be better suited to the stage, where social mores mean the audience aren’t usually given to open, disdainful laughter. Byzantium bounces uncomfortably around through contemporary and generic signifiers, afraid to establish a discrete or engaging personal identity. A disappointment, given Jordan’s eminent talents.
