“Trust a minimalist to make absences as important as presences,” the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote about film director Jim Jarmusch. Presented on screen, it’s a practice that could easily be misunderstood as vague or pretentious, and often is. It’s why Jarmusch, over a long career that’s produced 11 films in just over three decades — which are being screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in a retrospective pegged to the release of his latest film, the superb “Only Lovers Left Alive” — is routinely labeled as self-consciously cool, a filmmaker who makes work where nothing happens, all style and no substance.
But what makes Jarmusch an interesting and oddly consistent filmmaker, contra popular belief, is that there’s often a lot happening between what’s there and not there, the absences and presences Rosenbaum describes. “Only Lovers Left Alive,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 and traversed the festival circuit through the end of the year, contains the biggest absence in any of Jarmusch’s films — centuries lived by the two main characters, vampires Adam (Tom Hiddelston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton). When we meet the couple they are living in Detroit and Tangiers respectively, cities on opposite ends of the globe not coincidently marked by a certain chiseled away or burned out absence. Erudite outsiders with years of knowledge and experience behind them, they are forced to hustle to acquire the blood they need to survive — you can’t just go biting people’s necks anymore, can you? — while living out their final days in darkness as the world closes in on them.
What Jarmusch crafts out of these materials is maybe the longest love story in history. But Adam and Eve’s idyllic fading into the good night is disrupted by the appearance of Eve’s sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), whose reckless behavior threatens to suddenly and tragically end what they’ve been holding onto for years.
Like many of Jarmusch’s films, “Lovers” is as much about the characters as it is about time itself. The lack of a sustained plot, another absence, is intentional, which results in wonderful scenes of the two simply being present. You get the feeling Jarmusch is more than happy making an entire film in one room with Adam as he plays obscure blues records and strums feedback-laden chords on his guitar.
And it’s time that has strengthened the bond between Adam and Eve. As the two come to terms with the end of their experience, you feel the weight of that time pressing down on the film — what makes this work uniquely powerful is the way that, beneath the surface, there exist depths of emotion that are felt but not explained. They don’t need to be. In the film’s final moments, it’s hard not to think Jarmusch had the words of a former collaborator, Neil Young, rolling around his head (or blasting out of his speakers): “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
