In the Tangier café, during the final moments of Only Lovers Left Alive, the crowd listens with increasing intensity as Hamdan’s song crescendos. She sings about the pain of separation from a loved one. “I have no solution,” she repeats in Arabic.
[…] Jarmusch’s film takes place in sites like Cairo’s favelas. It oscillates between Adam’s reclusive life in Detroit and Eve’s conversations with her old friend, the vampire Christopher Marlowe […], in Tangier. Jarmusch has remarked that both places contain immense histories of music, art, and creativity. For him, Detroit—like parts of the postcolonial world or like the dying, cultured vampires—is the remains of a great civilization that has come to pass. In the film, even modernity itself has become such a place, housing a humanity that once thrived with life and culture but has now stagnated and self-polluted. Its rottenness is marked by the decline of the human body (impure blood) and the social, economic, and political efforts that made this possible. […]
From this milieu, Hamdan’s Hal both emerges and intervenes: the song is new but feels old. It begins pensively but, as if embodying modernity’s throes of death, escalates; so too do the lives of Adam and Eve as the final scene of Only Lovers Left Alive jolts out of the languishing, contemplative movement of the previous hour of the film. After listening to Hamdan, they wander, starved, into an alley, contemplating humanity’s unsolvable wars for oil and water. They spot a couple in the open beyond the alley and, in mutual silence, decide to perform the act they’ve foregone for so many years. No more blood banks. No more pure O negative drunk from vials. No more civility. “What choice do we have?” Adam says. In moments of despair, they yield to their most basic intuition and, just before the screen cuts to black, leap forward as the uncannily-agile, fanged monsters the viewer knows them to be. Ma fish hall. There is no solution, only a return to who they are, an acceptance of the state of affairs.
[…] The final moments of Only Lovers Left Alive […] surprised and confused me. They seemed to act out what political philosopher Hannah Arendt desired as a resolution to modern meaninglessness and alienation through their sociopolitical horrors: a return to some essential kind of self, something “anthropomorphic,” in her words, or “something prior,” in (Talal) Asad’s. Adam and Eve become the most essential part of themselves, no longer the cultured, self-aware, apprehensive intellectuals they’ve been for centuries. They move from a life of paralyzed contemplation to living. They are only lovers left alive.
— “Hal”, Haris A. Durrani
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