film Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate: Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart
Directed by David Slade. Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ashley Greene, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli, Dakota Fanning. 12A cert, gen release, 124 min.
IF YOU WERE in a hoity-toity mood, you might argue that, since the publication of The Pilgrim's Progressin 1678, no literary sensation has been so dependant on allegory and metaphor as has Stephenie Meyer's Twilightsaga.
Vampire stories have, of course, always addressed the average mortal's neuroses about sex and death. But the Twilightsequence is one vast meditation on the ghastliness of growing up and the pressures it exerts on a poor, pale-skinned girl. Will I allow my boyfriend to bite my neck before marriage? Is there a reason I feel different to all the other girls? Can I avoid engaging with the everyday adult world altogether? The subtext has broken above ground and totally overpowered the superstructure.
Such are the overwhelming allegorical demands placed on the big-screen adaptations that the larger narrative arcs tend to get somewhat submerged.
The third picture in the cycle – better than the second, but not as good as the earthy opening chapter – begins with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the series’ wistful Everygirl, snuggling up to Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), her furrowed vampire boyfriend, in that dappled field from the 1980s Flake advertisement.
Following a period of estrangement, during which Bella became dangerously close to Jake (Taylor Lautner), a teak-faced werewolf, the couple are now considering life after graduation. Edward has reluctantly agreed that, once she has secured her diploma, he will turn her into a member of the undead and they will live happily ever after (and we do mean everafter).
Trouble is, however, brewing up north. The evil Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) has gathered together a cadre of newborn vampires and has encouraged them to chew a path all the way from Seattle to Bella's front door. The family Cullen then negotiates a deal with the neighbouring werewolves to . . . Oh, blah blah blah. David Slade, the British film-maker who gained fame with Hard Candy, has already directed a fine vampire film in 30 Days of Night, but he seems properly aware that Eclipseis not really a horror movie. The werewolf transformations are perfunctory. The final conflagration, featuring less blood than you'd expect to encounter in a typical game of Twister, flits by in a discreet flurry of speeding elbows and smeared mascara.
The core of the third episode is, without question, the quivering triangle defined by Bella, Edward and Jake. The key sequence involves no violence, no supernatural outbreaks and no incantations of ancient rites. Sheltering with Bella in a wind-battered tent, Edward realises that his chilly metabolism cannot warm his beloved and he is forced to watch in torment as Jake crawls into her sleeping bag. This genuinely queasy, impressively transgressive scene requires just one gesture to sum up the picture’s central dilemma: do you want a wan boy who can read you poetry or a rugged one who, with just a penknife and a log, can build you a working canoe? (Shrieking punters at the screening I attended seemed to favour the shirtless lumberjack.)
Maintaining the mumblecore aesthetic that Catherine Hardwicke brought to part one, Slade does an impressive job of layering every scene with hormonal angst and teenage uncertainty. The damp scenery of the Pacific Northwest is augmented with a decent indie soundtrack – Beck and Bat for Lashes warble the main theme – to produce an ideal audiovisual manifestation of the bubbling neuroses. Even the most even-tempered of middle-aged viewers will find his or her door-slamming, parent-chewing tendencies aggravated by the film’s sulky close.
Still, it must be acknowledged that the series is a little preachy on the subject of sexual abstinence and a little too keen to indulge teenagers' illusions of difference and alienation. Contemplating the vast sales of Meyer's tomes, one imagines a variation on the best joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Four-and-a-half million teens (it really is that many) wave copies of Eclipseat their leader and sombrely intone the same desperate mantra: "We are all different. We are all alienated".
Never mind. There are worse ways of pampering such fantasies than accompanying the little darlings to these impressively entertaining pictures.
