10:18am Friday 19th December 2008
By Joanne Mace
THE association of vampires with sex is, let’s face it, nothing new.
From Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula to more explicit filmic explorations of bloodsucking, such as Tony Scott’s The Hunger and TV juggernauts Buffy/Angel, there’s just something about all that blood and biting which is ripe for creative exploration.
Twilight is an adaptation of the first of Stephanie Meyer’s four vampire novels. Despite its derivative nature, and many other things we could get into discussing now but haven’t the space, it has enjoyed huge success thanks to its communicating a particularly potent form of teenage longing.
And, having read the book and enjoyed it as a slice of escapist romance, I was anxious to see what director Catherine Hardwicke would make of it on the big screen.
It’s thanks to her that the novel is treated as faithfully as it has been, given that she returned the studio’s first script wherein leading lady Bella Swan was a cheerleader.
We open with a deer crashing violently through undergrowth, and during the rest of the film’s running time, Hardwicke’s camera continuously whirls and spills around forests and the natural world.
The trump card is its inspired non-glossy casting of the leads. The delicate and slightly elfin Kristen Stewart is plaintive and pensive, just as Bella should be, matched by Britain’s Robert Pattinson as the other-wordly vampire leading man, Edward Cullen.
The two meet in Forks, Washington, when Bella comes to live with her police chief dad. The locals of the small town are fascinated with this “shiny new toy”, especially the young men of her class, but she instantly has eyes only for Edward, who enters the cafeteria in hilarious slo-mo.
His initial aversion to her company is explained after he saves her life in the school car park. Whaddya know – he’s a vampire and finds her irresistible.
As Edward leans towards Bella and whispers: “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you any more”, no one will be in any doubt as to why thousands of screaming girls turned up at film’s Leicester Square premiere.
Pattinson is also completely gorgeous in a tortured non-obvious way, and he and Stewart have the magic ingredient money can’t buy – a scorching chemistry.
It’s best showcased in a scene when they go out for dinner, and when they share their electric first kiss, and this connection manages to sustain the film in its weaker areas, when the special effects don’t quite convince, and when someone completely wrong is cast as the key nasty baddie.
I’d rather not think too much about Meyer’s Mormon intentions, and the moral code subtly advocated by the book which warns girls to remain chaste. I prefer to celebrate only that Twilight has both a nice obvious message – find someone who understands you and accepts you for what you are – and an independent, intelligent, book-reading heroine at its core.
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