#13 in my ranking of Tony Scott’s filmography.
Tony Scott emerges from his commercial period with his first feature film in over a decade, a vampire tale in two parts that’s all style and almost no substance. I say almost no substance because there are a couple of small and interesting little twists on vampire lore going on here that do actually feed the overall film, but they’re never explored in great detail and ultimately fall to the side in favor of blue-steel visuals of people inside with glasses while doves fly around. It’s far from the worst thing in the world, but I really just get this sense that Scott was going for cool over anything else.
The first half of the film is centered around Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and her fellow vampire and lover, John (David Bowie), our introduction to them being this weird sequence (weird mostly because of the sound design) where they pick up a pair of victims at a rave, take them back to their townhouse in New York, seduce them, and then feed. I really get this impression that there was this desire to elevate vampires by making them darker, sexier, and by never once saying the word vampire. Those always fail, in my mind, because, ultimately, you’re just dealing with vampires while acting like you’re being coy about it. The coyness falls flat, and you’re just left with self-importance around something kind of silly. Importance comes from character, and characterization isn’t that strong here.
The second half is where the film kind of loses me a bit. The narrative elements, as simplistic as they had been, kind of just get dumber and more rote within vampire lore while Scott continues to amp up his stylistic flourishes. Essentially, Miriam needs a new familiar (or not since they turn vampire), and she immediately chooses Sarah. Why? I dunno. Because she just showed up at her door, is reasonably attractive, and Miriam is so needy that she’ll just grab the next person who comes along? We don’t get to know much about Miriam despite spending so much of the movie with her, she’s mostly smoky, French stares at people, so it could be that. The movie provides nothing to actually substantiate it, though.
And the final act is this moody extended bit where Sarah’s boyfriend, Tom (Cliff de Young), goes looking for her while Sarah deals with the fact that she’s now a monster, but only in the most oblique of ways. And there’s blood and dust and stuff that fills the screen in slow motion. I mean, if I cared about…anyone in this film the final bits of stylistic flexing from the young Tony Scott might mean something, but the movie has been nothing but stylistic flexing from him up to that point.
So, I like the variations on the vampire lore. They provide some interesting grounding for the film to go in a new direction with a focus on character. The movie mostly wastes that potential, though, with largely empty characters that need to be propped up entirely by the actors, only Bowie really being up for it, and we’re left with a lot of steel-blue visuals of people inside with sunglasses at night. I suppose I should also give props to the moment that John kills the young girl that he and Miriam have been teaching the viola to for a year because it’s a nice moment of desperation from him, but the mixing of vampire lore, while kind of interesting, is also incomplete. It’s hard to know if he thinks that the act will reverse his plight or if he’s just got that eponymous hunger in his final moments. I dunno.
I mean, I’ve seen far worse, but this is kind of a muddle to get through with nothing tangible to latch onto as an audience. It kind of reminds me of the later Underworld, throwing anything at the wall in terms of lore, upping style, and just kind of forgetting how stories get told.
Originally published here
English (US) · 