In the Flesh: Byzantium

A rancid little mother/daughter drama stretched out over two centuries and told in overlapping, contradictory skeins of personal narrative, Byzantium follows Clare/Clara/Camilla Webb (Gemma Arterton in the only role I’ve ever really loved her for) and her daughter Eleanor (Saorise Ronan), a vampire coven of two eternally on the run from forces unknown. Eleanor, eternally sixteen, longs to be known, to communicate the vast depth of her past. Clare dismisses her long life as an irrelevance, living wholly in the moment as she struggles to provide for and protect the child she cursed with immortality. She is an unchanging creature, true to her earliest experiences even after two hundred years, her lower-class accent and predatory, utilitarian trashiness straight from the squalor of the Georgian era. “I hate the way that you talk,” Eleanor screams at her during a fight. “It makes me sick.”

The tension between the two women animates the little-discussed film, Ronan’s sad-eyed Eleanor a quiet phantom visible to herself only through the cracked and garish lens of a mother whose position as her caretaker has endured long past its natural span. Arterton’s purring mannerisms and brusque half-truths transform over the course of the movie from a more conventional seductive persona to a kind of scuttling, hysterical traumatic reaction, injecting much-needed abjection into what might otherwise feel too sedate, too placid. Eleanor’s romantic story of her own life is made real by that squalid personality, that predatory sexuality and indeed the sexual frisson between mother and daughter, whose arguing invariably ends in the stroking of hair or tearful, desperate embraces.

The film’s sets are desolate, rotting tenements and the weather-stripped gloom beneath the piers of coastal England. Its vision of vampirism is deliciously oblique. A stone hut on a nameless island. Starlings pulsing through the fading light. Blood flowing in rivers as the chosen meet their own reflections and begin to feed, or are fed on. Dying. Being born. “This is the end,” says Eleanor’s double when her mother, crushingly lonely in her immortality and desperate to save her child from the disease an old enemy has raped into her, takes her to the isle. “The end of what?” asks Eleanor. “Of time,” the double answers. If the film’s resolution is a shade too tidy, it undoes none of the desolate beauty that comes before. The desperate lives of Clare and Eleanor live in every inch of it, and like the executioner’s blade looted from Constantinople for which the film is named, the past never loses its killing edge.