If you’re a fan of style over substance, this is your movie! Come for the sex scene, stay for the gauzy curtains and dust motes. It’s Bowie, for goodness’ sake!
Tagline: “Nothing Human Loves Forever.”
WTF Factor: *** for the finale.
Notable Quote:
Miriam: “Humankind have one way. We have another. Their end is final. Ours is not. In the earth, it’s rotted wood. In the eternal darkness, we will see and hear and feel.”
The image on the European posters is much more evocative. The tagline is, “To survive, they need love and blood.” Sounds about right.
Synopsis: Cue a performance of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus under the credits. The setting is a goth/punk club. John (David Bowie) and Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) Blaylock are dressed as rich scene-sters. They pick up a punk couple and take them home. Intercut with footage of a crazed monkey killing another monkey, we see John and Miriam pull out ankh knives and exit punkers with slit throats. The remains go in a furnace. One gets the strong feeling that they have done this before.
Later we see John unable to sleep, intercut with a team of scientists, led by Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) and Tom Haver (Cliff De Young), trying to figure out why the surviving monkey is manic ever since it stopped sleeping. [One might get the impression that all the intercutting is symbolic.] John has a flashback to the 1700s, when he is a cellist who is seduced by pianist Miriam, who promises to love him, “Forever and ever.” In the present, they play classical music together with Alice, a local girl who plays violin.
John is not feeling so great. Miriam and John see Sarah on TV talking about progeria (pronounced incorrectly), a disease similar to premature aging, and longevity. Miriam visits the aging research institute but they have no information to help her. She does find out that they are experimenting with accelerating aging but have not yet slowed it down. It is now clear that John is rapidly aging, and neither he nor Miriam is pleased. John questions her about the “Forever and ever” part of their arrangement, and whether Alice is going to be “next.”
John goes to the aging Institute to see Sarah, but Sarah blows him off. He ages significantly as he waits for her to come back. Meanwhile the monkey is aging rapidly and eventually dies and rots. John leaves in a huff and when Sarah sees how old he has gotten, she is intrigued. John is getting very hungry and he’s eyeing necks all around him. He attacks a skater in an underpass but he is unsuccessful in drinking his blood. Alice arrives at the house. John, now elderly, kills Alice and feeds.
When Miriam returns, John is very old, and asks to die. He soon collapses and Miriam carries him up to the attic of their townhouse. Uh oh. Miriam keeps all her former lovers in the attic, in coffins, in the fog, surrounded by billowing curtains, with doves, no less. Miriam sticks John in a coffin and John is not pleased. Miriam is not pleased either but life goes on.
Sarah stops by to see John but Miriam tells her that John has gone to Switzerland, and blows her off as a policeman comes looking for Alice. Sarah is developing an obsession with Miriam; she sees her in various places and they seem to have a psychic connection. She’s waiting impatiently for Miriam to call. Distracted from her work, Sarah finally goes to see Miriam. Miriam seduces her while playing the Flower Duet from Lakmé on the piano, which is not a cliché at all. Miriam and Susan get it on. They also take each other’s blood, although Sarah doesn’t remember that part.
Sarah and Tom argue because Sarah is preoccupied and does not eat her dinner. Tom is very suspicious, exactly what of is not clear. Later Sarah is vomiting and shaky. Tom insist that she undergo tests at the clinic and it turns out that she has non-human blood in her veins, fighting her own blood cells. Tom is not pleased. Sarah is not pleased either and starts to remember what happened at Miriam’s place. She goes and confronts Miriam. Miriam says that the foreign blood is hers, “I’ve given you everlasting life.” Sarah is furious and Miriam flings her across the room easily. Sarah walks out but she is really not well now, looking and acting like a junkie. She finally returns to Miriam.
Miriam brings a yuppie poser back to the house and drinks his blood while Sarah watches, so she will know what to do. They need to feed once every seven days. Tom arrives and Miriam sends him to Sarah. Sarah tries to warn him away but she is overcome with bloodlust. While Sarah is feeding, Miriam remembers her time in ancient Egypt. Sarah arrives covered in blood and kisses Miriam deeply, while slitting her own throat with the ankh. It’s blood city now. Miriam takes Sarah to the attic but something’s wrong up there. There’s what looks like an earthquake and the coffins slide around on the floor. All her old lovers want to get up and play now. WTF. Miriam is not pleased and while fleeing falls over a banister to land several stories below. She starts to age and eventually turns into a rotting corpse. The lovers’ corpses crumble upon the landing once Miriam is “dead.”
The policeman comes back but the townhouse is now for sale. We see Sarah hanging out in a penthouse with a young female lover. Miriam is in a coffin all alone, calling for Sarah. It’s not quite the end for her.
Thoughts: This is worth a watch for the beautiful images and the overwhelming cool of Bowie and Deneuve as a team. Known for its gorgeous art design and photography, and for its sex scene, this is a vampire movie for those who find vampires déclassé. In fact, the word “vampire” is never mentioned. These are individuals who walk in the daylight, admire their own reflections, and draw blood with knives instead of fangs.
The movie is loosely based on the novel by Whitley Strieber. I am deliberately ignoring some of the explanations found only in the book. There are fascinating hints that Miriam is an immortal “something else,” but the implications are never really explored in the movie. We don’t know why her originally human lovers only last a few hundred years. Are there others like Miriam out there? The ending is completely changed from the book, giving us something more like Daughters of Darkness (1971).
This was director Tony Scott’s (brother of Ridley Scott) first theatrical film; he went on to direct Top Gun, True Romance, and other major films. The film sets up a nice dichotomy between the 18th century romanticism of John and Miriam, and Sarah’s contrasting 20th century sensibilities. The juxtaposition of science and vampirism really doesn’t come together, though.
Without reading the book, the events in the attic at the end make no sense at all. Why do all the lovers rise out of their coffins? Why do they then crumble to dust when Miriam ages? At the end of the movie, even though Miriam is dust, she is still sentient in her coffin and calling for Sarah. What about the dust of her lovers? Are their consciousness’ still out there? And why is Sarah now healthy and apparently carrying on Miriam’s legacy? It’s better not to think of these things.
Random thoughts:
- Dick Smith (The Exorcist, The Godfather Part II) did the aging makeup for Bowie’s character.
- The film was originally sold to the public using the sex scene between Miriam and Sarah; it seemed racy at the time to see two name brand actresses in a lesbian scene, but the billowy curtains and frequent cutting make the scene seem very tame by today’s standards.
- Notable Credit: Refers to Bauhaus as “Disco group” in final credits, which is pretty insulting for a seminal goth band.
Suggested double feature: Daughters of Darkness (1971) is the obvious choice.
Tagline for Coming Attraction: “Castaway on a forbidden planet…Their craving for the strange exotic fruit…Drives them to madness…And unspeakable horror!”
