Talking Mystery Train with Allison Kupatt

I loved Jim Jarmusch's latest, Only Lovers Left Alive, so much when I saw it at TIFF that I was eager to revisit some of the director's other work and talk about it, particularly the films that reminded me most of Only Lovers, Down By Law and Mystery Train. I had a back-and-forth discussion with Allion Kupatt of Nerdvampire about the latter, a transcript of which has been reproduced below. I had a great time talking to Allison about the film, which is one of the Jarmusch films I love best but the one I've had the hardest time articulating what it is about the movie that grabs me. Having a companion to discuss it was a great pleasure, not only to hear what someone else took from this intimate movie but to help clarify my own long-clouded thoughts. Anyway, if you haven't seen Mystery Train, I highly recommend it (you can watch it on Criterion's Hulu+ channel, which is the best $8/month you can possibly spend). If you have, check out our breakdown, after the jump.

TIFF Capsules

Here are links to the capsules I wrote for Movie Mezzanine during TIFF.

This link contains capsules for Bastards (Claire Denis), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch) and La última película (Raya Martin and Mark Peranson).

This one talks about Horns (Alexandre Aja) and 'Til Madness Do Us Part (Wang Bing).

This link features capsules for A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell) and Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt).

Also, here are Dork Shelf capsules for Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partov), A Field in England (Ben Wheatley) and Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez).

Criminally Underrated: The Limits of Control

I loved Jim Jarmusch's divisive (to say the least) post-modern noir when it came out in 2009, and finally watching one of its biggest inspirations, The Lady from Shanghai, inspired me to revisit the film. If anything, I love it even more, so I had to write about it for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. This new piece incorporates some of the views I expressed at the time, but I tried to refine the more scattered thoughts. Not that any succinct summary could ever capture the intoxicating beauty of what Jarmusch and Christopher Doyle shot.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Limits of Control

Allow me to start this review by simply jumping to the lede, if you don't like Jim Jarmusch or have not watched enough of his films to base an opinion on him, do not watch The Limits of Control. Possibly the most "pretentious" film the minimalistic auteur has ever made, it alienated the critical community upon release and makes the rest of his work look mainstream in comparison.

Happily, I am a Jim Jarmusch fan, though that doesn't make this film any less daunting. I'm no stranger to his hip, stark irony, but with The Limits of Control Jarmusch strips film down to its barest elements, a literal take on the title of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. A deadpan mixture of Le Samouraï and Waiting For Godot, The Limits of Control represents the apex of just how Jarmsuch-y Jarmsuch can be: if he takes anything else out of the cinematic equation he'd just be a guy on street corners yelling about being on-screen.

Limits follows an unnamed assassin known as the Lone Man (Issach de Bankolé), an appropriately stoic fellow who looks like a freshly chiseled statue. Over the course of two hours, he wonders Spain from café to café, intercepting instructions from couriers that lead only to yet more couriers. Like Godot, the film is concerned less with an expected action than the expectation itself.

Each of the characters Lone Man meets has a distinct quirk, their names -- Guitar (John Hurt), Mexican (Gael Garcia Bernal) -- matching the bare structure of the film. Numerous visual and spoken references to cinema are made, from the film's broad appropriation of Antonioni's sense of ennui to a spoken reference to Aki Kaurismäki by Guitar and a discussion with a platinum-blond Tilda Swinton about Rita Hayworth's own dye-job in The Lady from Shanghai. Lone Man spends much of his free time in art galleries, and Schubert's name is floated about at times. Jarmusch mocks the spy/hitman convention of the required female sexuality by casting a woman (Pax de la Huerta) in the role of Nude; see if you can guess what her particular trait is.

The Limits of Control goes nowhere and it doesn't get there with any speed, yet, in its own quiet way, it's as much a celebration of the cinema as Quentin Tarantino's slice of movie revelry Inglourious Basterds. More so, even, as Jarmusch's open consideration of other media such as painterly art and classical movement and its existential and scientific philosophizing brings him closer to the more sophisticated and well-read Godard (Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote of Tarantino and Godard that weighing the two was "like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video-rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide," a statement I find harsh but not exactly indefensible). Jarmusch seems to be having just as much fun as Tarantino did, and, like the B-movie-obsessed auteur's Jewish revenge tale, there's more here than meets the eye.

Not that it isn't entirely pleasant to sit back and let the eyes have a field day, however. Jarmusch made some visually striking works with Robby Müller, but his cinematographer here is the great Christopher Doyle, one of the finest in the business today. You may know him from his work with Wong Kar-wai (if you don't, rectify this immediately), and I'm amazed to say that his work here not only rivals his contributions to Wong's canon but exceeds it in places. He captures in minute details the wonder's of de Bankolé's magnificent face and captures the streets of Spain with breathtakingly simple beauty. Occasionally, he lets the sunlight bleed into the frame, creating an impressionistic wash of colors. Don't expect anything from this film to come up during awards season, but the only other film that can compete with Doyle's work is Alexis Zabe's poetic photography for Silent Light.

The closest the film comes to action occurs in the closest thing it has to a climax, when Lone Man meets American (Bill Murray), a foul-mouthed man who lambastes everything that came up in discussion over the course of the film, dismissing them as bohemian distractions. Murray is clearly channeling Dick Cheney, which makes his appearance in a random bunker all the funnier. His presence adds a political aspect to the film, though I'm damned if I know what it is other than a vague commentary on perceived American superiority and a conservative disregard for the beauty of the world (his bunker isn't quite ascetic with its extra furniture, but it's amusing that the only discernible wall "decoration" is a fire extinguisher).

The Limits of Control repeats phrases and scenes with minor variations, to the point that it's easy to doze off in its repetition and come back to the film later and feel that nothing's changed; however, its cross between the hitman genre and a vignette style should give fans of Ghost Dog and Coffee and Cigarettes (or really any of the director's early work) a tether to the Jarmusch they know and love. The DVD comes with the typical pullquotes, and the blurbs calling it a "stylish and sexy thriller" that "shimmers with heat and suspense" are about as funny as anything in the actual movie. I cannot definitively say what it's about or even what I think it's about, but I also don't entirely care. Sure, this movie is so narrow in its appeal that I feel I not only need to wear a beret while watching the film but find a way to hook that beret on cigarettes; but if I genuinely loved this film, will gladly watch it again soon to figure out more of the puzzle and find it almost as immediately arresting as the best of Jarmusch's work, am I really pretentious?

Dead Man

Jim Jarusch's '80s filmography was enough to make me an ardent fan, but nothing prepared me for Dead Man. At once a film far beyond his low-key, minimalistic satires and the fulfillment of their possibilities, it applies his unique style to a genre aesthetically antithetical to it: the Western. The Western is a genre about bigness: big settings, big personas and, most of all, big guns. For Jarmusch to make one, even an alternative "acid" Western, seems on paper to be madness.

Instead, it takes the idea of the Acid Western to its extreme. Acid Westerns grew out of the counterculture of the '60s, as well as the genre's appropriation by other countries, specifically the Italians with their spaghetti Westerns. Both genres praised individual strength and personal morality: classic Westerns depicted the individualistic hero as a beacon of general Americana, a reflection of our can-do attitude and a literal representation of pioneering spirit, while the Westerns of the post-Vietnam era presented the individual as the true source of morality in the face of corrupt society, even if the counterculture ideals could not be fully applied as the heroes still resorted to mass displays of violence that only a few seemed to genuinely regret (and none of them half so much as the samurai in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the basis for the Man With No Name and therefore countless other Western anti-heroes).

Dead Man, however, strips away all notions of nobility in the Old West. Everything that you need to know about the episodic film can be gleaned from its first vignette, a short film in its own right: William Blake (Johnny Depp), a broke accountant from Cleveland, scraped together just enough cash to head out to the frontier town of Machine where he's been guaranteed a job by metal works owner Mr. Dickinson. The roughly nine-minute sequence begins with Blake in a train car surrounding by passengers of his social status. They're all well-dressed, polite, headed out to the West for new and bold opportunities, ideal Western characters all. Jarmusch fades to some time later, and Blake looks up to see a few new passengers of the scruffier variety. This happens again, and suddenly Blake is sitting among disgusting rabble, scraggly beards and missing teeth. A coal-coated boilerman (Crispin Glover) approaches and warns him of heading out west to Machine ("to Hell," as he calls it). As the boilerman continues to caution Blake, the other passengers suddenly open the windows and fire at buffalo roaming the landscape beside the train. "Government reckons they [various passengers of this sort] killed about a million last year." In nine minutes, Jarmusch masterfully takes our idea of the cinematic Western and destroys it, presenting us instead with a group of ordinary people looking not to find prosperity through honest work out West but to taint and rape another part of the Earth after ruining someplace east beyond capacity.

The boilerman's warnings ring in Blake's head as he walks through the decadent town of Machine, and when he arrives at Dickinson's a callous secretary (John Hurt) says with ample derision that Blake's message was postmarked two months ago and the position has long since been filled. That night, a former prostitute takes pity on him when he helps her up in the street and takes him back to her place, only for her ex- (and Mr. Dickinson's son) Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) to pop in and shoot both Thel and Bill, killing her and lodging a bullet near William's heart.

If the film had not yet established its break from the genre to your satisfaction, here the film moves into marvelously, woefully uncharted territory. Blake is rescued by a Native American named Nobody, a man of mixed tribal descent and a European upbringing who tells Blake that he couldn't remove the bullet from his chest and that his days are numbered. Nobody refers to his new companion as "stupid fucking white man" until he at last asks for William's name, only to react with a start. "You're William Blake?" he asks incredulously, "Then you are a dead man!" Nobody is thinking of the poet William Blake, his literary hero and seemingly the one aspect of his Western education for which he is grateful. Suddenly enthused at what he believes to be the incarnation of the poet, Nobody decides to take Blake to the Pacific Coast so that he might return this vessel to the spirit-world, and along the way they will kill any white men who cross them. Jarmusch says that he used Blake's poetry in connection with the Native American history he studied for the film as he thought Blake's style and topics fit nicely with what he discovered about Native Americans and their perspectives, so perhaps he works through Nobody, realigning William Blake's legacy to the Indians by breaking violently from the Europeans.

That's not to say that Nobody is a well-cultured savage looking for revenge; on the contrary, Dead Man contains the fairest depiction of Native Americans I've ever seen in a Western. The materialistic, imperialist whites headed west for money and found harsh, unforgiving terrains. Even so, they subjugated the Indians there simply to claim the land as Manifest Destiny and stuck it out on principle. Perhaps the greatest example of this comes when Nobody sends Blake into a camp of mad fur traders led by "Sally," a cross-dressing, Bible-preaching trader played by Iggy Pop. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in a Jarmusch film, yet it ultimately works brilliantly: the traders tread the line between absurdity and terror, a trio driven mad by the West's desolation that strike us initially as loopy until they reveal themselves as demented rapists.

Blake and Nobody's tripped-out journey shows how easily demons can be awakened in the face of the nothingness of the West. Nobody, witty and kind, is also a merciless killer in battle. Abducted as a child, Nobody was paraded around the United States before being placed on a ship and sent to England to be gawked at and, eventually, educated. Naturally a victim of white racism, his European adolescence alienated him from the Native Americans. That feeling of solitude is perhaps what drives him to push Blake into murder, but it does not explain why he would go out of his way to save the man's life without ever knowing him, nor his general amicability with others. The two men, cut off socially from their peers, must instead connect on genuine, personal grounds, and Blake simply finds that the Indians are more charitable and open than his own race.

Their bond is juxtposed with a trio of bounty hunters sent by Charlie's dad, the metal works owner Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his final role), to avenge his son and also, perhaps preferably, retrieve his pinto. The three -- an African-American boy, a loudmouthed fool, and a sadistic cannibal named Cole (Lance Henriksen) -- sleep with one eye open watching each other, but wariness doesn't save the other two from Cole, who tires of both, kills them and roasts them on a fire. Another major white figure is a racist missionary (Alfred Molina) who denies supplies to Nobody that he in turn offers to Blake, then attempts to kill Blake upon recognizing him.

True to his style, Jarmusch uses sparse dialogue in the film, but it speaks volumes, as much, if not more so, than even the most intricate Tarantino riff. As Nobody confuses Depp's Blake with the poet Blake, William Blake's work seeps into the movie, always working within the context of the film and often on several layers above it. When Nobody tells Blake they're being followed, William starts to formulate a plan, realizes he has nothing and immediately asks Nobody what to do. "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow," Nobody responds sardonically. The line is a direct lift from Blake's poetry (far from the only one), but in that one moment we can read much into Nobody and his sense of irony: the eagle of course represents the United States, our proud vision of ourselves, while the crow, the meeker bird and, in the context of the quote, lesser and mediocre compared to the eagle, stands for Native Americans, possibly the Blackfoot that make up a part of Nobody's heritage (you could argue that it stands for the Crow Nation, but I think that's too literal and the Crow don't feature in the film and they were even enemies of the Blackfoot). Nobody's delivery of the line coldly mocks the white attitude toward the natives, and in a larger sense prevents the moment from becoming Hollywood "come together" tripe by pointing out how ludicrous it is for any white people to think this way instead of praising one white person for thinking progressively.

Blake's poetry isn't the only allusion to other works, however, and many of Jarmusch's references are slyly anachronistic. The names of several minor characters mirror 20th century musicians such as Lee Hazelwood or Benmont Tench. Nobody's real name, "He Who Talk Loud Say Nothing," is a reference to the James Brown classic "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing." In fact, I couldn't help but think of Homer's Odyssey in connection to Nobody: in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus gives his name as "Nobody" so that when he attacks the beast, his screams of "Nobody is killing me!" turn potential helpers away. When Blake stumbles into Iggy Pop's (himself a 20th century musician) camp, he inadvertently lures the rapists into making the first move and sealing their fate by saying "I'm with Nobody."

Jarmusch said he was attracted to the idea of a Western because of its "inseparable connection to America"¹, and Dead Man certainly presents us with a vision of America. However, his West demonstrates the fascism that a celebration of individualism, when married with a sense of the superiority of personal morals over societal norms, can create. Nobody gives Blake hallucinogens to send him on a "vision quest," and part of his alignment with nature results in the death of two U.S. Marshals. When Charlie attacked him in the bed, Blake took three shots to hit a man standing still not 20 feet away. Slowly though, the influence of his surroundings and the people already converted by them reveal how easy it is to take another person's life in the wilderness. Jarmusch's Western doesn't celebrate its connection to America, it unveils our propensity to violence.

Neil Young's scattered electric twang of a soundtrack sets the mood for the picture, gently warping the background in its quieter moments and swelling into grungy, distorted nightmares as Blake's spiritual quest awakens the beast within to send him back to this sinister nature. It's the perfect capper to one of the most unique and rewarding cinematic experiences of my life. I'm never quite sure what constitutes a revisionist Western -- many include the spaghetti Westerns, but for my money Leone and many of the others never drifted far enough away from conventional Western tropes to qualify, save the odd duck here and there -- but either way Dead Man easily slides into my #2 spot behind Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Both are films that dismantle the structure of the Western, bringing it all crashing to the ground, but where Altman did so with regret and mourning, Jarmusch tackles the situation with pent-up rage, a fearsome rejection of the lie Hollywood fed us for decades. I would not go so far as to call Dead Man realistic -- anyone who has seen it knows that it's too out-there for that tag -- but here is a film that seeks to peel away the artifice of the Old West to show us an unforgiving terrain that consumes all those foolish enough to try to conquer it.

¹ http://www.nytrash.com/deadman/deadjj.html#2

1989 Rewind: Mystery Train

By 1989 and with only three films under his belt, Jim Jarmusch already had an identifiable auteurist stamp: his movies typically followed hipsters, loners and outright foreigners as they silently struggle to make sense of a physically and emotionally deteriorating America. Often, one or more characters identifies with the music of an artist, the camera rarely moves and the comedy is derived from moments of quiet irony and restrained oddity.

Mystery Train certainly contains all of these elements, and it points to future Jarmusch works Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth by introducing several entirely different segments with alternating casts. The title, the name of one of Elvis Presley's most enduring hits, clues us in to what artist will inform the sparse soundtrack, and though the plots and characters change across all three stories, the King remains a constant force, directly or indirectly, throughout the film.

Centered in Memphis, Mystery Train, incidentally Jarusch's first color film, is a step forward not only technologically but thematically. His foreign or at least alienated characters attempted to figure out New York City (Stranger Than Paradise) and, nominally, New Orleans (Down By Law), and Memphis is the last great city of the American cultural mythos to explore -- sure, you can argue Los Angeles for the film industry, but too much of Hollywood's output is product, not art. New York is where foreigners first arrive and where intellectual communities spring up, New Orleans birthed jazz, and Memphis is ground zero for both country and rock 'n' roll. Of the three cities, the brash attitude and the glittering ostentation of Memphis most closely aligns with our postwar cultural mindset; thus, Mystery Train, by dint of its setting, is Jarmusch's most ambitious film yet.

The first vignette, Far From Yokohama, follows a mismatched Japanese couple visiting Memphis to visit Sun Studios. The irrepressibly sunny and chattering Mitsuko obsesses over the King and wants to visit Sun Studios and Graceland, while the stoic and sullen Jun argues for Carl Perkins. They rent a room from a motel that winds up the central location of each segment, managed by a flamboyant maitre d' (Screamin' Jay Hawkins). Jun remarks that Memphis is simply Yokohama with more buildings (echoing a sentiment Eddie expressed over New York and Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise), and the closest the couple has to a full display of emotion is a heated debate over their respective artists, which is funny because they have a sex scene.

Jarmusch brilliantly layers this sequence to set up the conceit of the entire film: the difficulty of communication between people. That's been Jarmusch's main thrust in his previous features, but never has he explored this theme so thoroughly. Obviously, Mitsuko and Jun experience communication issues with Americans -- in a superb scene, the pair stands bewildered as a Sun Studios guide barrels through a speech she's given endless times; she speaks so quickly that I suspect that Jarmusch played it through the couple's POV as it further stresses how hard she is to understand -- but the key depiction of personal isolation in the vignette occurs between Mitsuko and Jun. Their deep, confrontational love for different artists is less an expression of preference than a representation of their inability to find common ground. Thus, in retrospect, when they momentarily share headphones to listen to the titular song, its a bigger emotional payoff than the sex.

That out-of-the-box approach to the writing defines the other two stories as well. Luisa, an Italian widow, finds herself stranded in Memphis with her husband's casket after her plane breaks down in A Ghost. Jarmusch uses steady tracking shots to follow her around the streets as she looks for a hotel to sleep the night, remaining constantly perpendicular with the character as if taking in the city from the windows of a car. These shots are simultaneously beautiful but emotionally vacant, like a tourist's journey through a city. She eventually reaches the same hotel from the first segment, where she agrees to room with a fast-talking girl named Dee-Dee who ran out on her man so fast she forgot to bring enough cash to rent a room. Dee-Dee never shuts up until she falls asleep, Luisa tells her roommate about her day, but when they part in the morning, the two, who both had suddenly found themselves without their lovers and therefore had something to share, leave without making any sort of connection.

In contrast, the final and most absurdist segment, Lost in Space, turns the stark disconnect between characters in the first two parts into the most open and accessible comedy in a Jarmusch film since the "Ice Cream" scene from Down By Low. Elvis showed up in the second act as a ghost, and Jarmusch reincarnates the King in this segment as the protagonist: Johnny's friends call him Elvis, and casting former Clash frontman Joe Strummer adds another element to the idea of the rebirth of Elvis and, by extension, rock. Elvis, Dee-Dee's boyfriend, lost not only her but his job, so he drinks himself into a suicidal stupor, and it's up to his friend Will Robinson and Dee-Dee's brother-in-law Charlie (Steve Buscemi) to sit on him. The three end up shooting a store clerk and hiding in the motel, where a brooding connection between Charlie and Johnny is hilariously severed when Charlie, who believes himself Johnny's brother-in-law, finds out that Elvis and Dee-Dee never married.

Jarmusch links the vignettes together in a final series of shots that seriously highlights how the characters are as isolated as they were at the start even as Jarmusch indulges in some terrific comedy. Johnny, Charlie and Will hop in their truck and try to sneak out of town and past the cops, despite the fact that the cops aren't even looking for them. The final shot shows them, as well as the characters aboard the train, turns the shot of the heroes riding off into the sunset on its head, and I didn't know whether to reflect on the film at that moment or burst out laughing.

Not a single line is wasted in the sparse dialogue of the film, but what makes Mystery Train even better is the way Jarmusch ties not only the characters and actions of each vignette together but elements from his catalog into the movie. Tom Waits reprises his role as DJ Lee Baby Sims from Down By Law as the voice of the Memphis radio station. Screamin' Jay Hawkins' presence alone is a reference, intentional or not, to Stranger Than Paradise, but when he remarks to an unlucky Charlie, "Boy, you got a curse on you," he's not only foreshadowing future events but coming close to the title of his signature tune "I Put a Spell on You." In that sense, Jarmusch uses Mystery Train to summarize and mark the end of his '80s work, and while I may prefer Down By Law, there's no denying the genius of this film.

Stranger Than Paradise

If Permanent Vacation hinted at a director to watch, Stranger Than Paradise put Jim Jarmusch on the map, and then some. For many, it is ground-zero of the modern independent film movement, intentionally giving off a hipster vibe, at least partially defining itself through its soundtrack, and filled to the rafters with bleak, bone-dry irony. The characters in Stranger Than Paradise play poker, because there's no more appropriate activity in this deadpan universe. Every minimalist shot, perfectly set-up for aesthetic effect and then left there until the scene ends, captures the stifling ennui of this world, a boredom that pervades every frame without ever making the experience boring for those watching this world.

In the center of all this is Willie (John Lurie), who lives in a ratty New York apartment watching T.V. all day. His Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) comes to visit, and he promptly shuts her off from the world. He doesn't want here in his apartment, but he also can't stand the idea of going outside to take her on a tour of the city, so he bids her to just stay in the room and be seen and not heard. If she can manage also not to be seen, more's the better. Then Eva nicks some food from the grocery store, and her cousin begins to show signs of respect.

Jarmusch structures the film through a series of vignettes, grouped into three acts, though he certainly doesn't need to do so because of the movie's plot-heavy nature. Large swaths of nothing happen in the film, which is of course the point. Willie and Eva lounge around and watch television, and Eva never sees anything of New York other than the inside of Willie's apartment. Willie's friend Eddie (Richard Edson) develops a crush on Eva, though perhaps not in the sense that you would think -- later, he and Willie tag along on a date Eva has with another man and he seems nonplussed. When Eva leaves to live with Aunt Lottie in Ohio, both men are clearly upset even though their frozen demeanor never changes. So, they decide to travel to Ohio, "rescue" Eva and, ultimately, move to Florida.

It sounds like a rebellious youth picture, something you'd expect James Dean or a young Brando to be in, which is why Stranger Than Paradise is so funny. Willie and Eddie spend all of their time indoors, yet when they get to a Cleveland blanketed in snow, Eddie hysterically deadpans, "You know it's funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same." There are no punchlines in the film, only ironic juxtapositions and subtle payoffs: we are presented with Willie, hipster scum who sits in his darkened apartment, the lowest of the low. Then we meet Eddie. Jarmusch sets up Willie's slight moral advantage in how the two pass their time: Willie bets on the horse races, but Eddie goes to the dog tracks.

But there is also a current of, not drama, but what would certainly be drama in another film. Willie decides to go to Eva because he's bored in New York, and when he finds himself just as bored in Cleveland he fixates on that brief flash of fun he had with his cousin. Thus, he aborts his trip to Florida, correctly realizing -- with the help of Eddie's straight-faced proclamation -- that a change of scenery isn't really a change at all. His paradise is Eva, though obviously not in a romantic way. Eddie too wants Eva, though his desire almost surely includes romance. For Eva, her paradise is America, the land that birthed her favorite artist, Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

As a series of mishaps build in the final act, all three characters see their ideas of paradise fade in their ennui-filled perspectives; Eva, bored with the U.S.A., attempts to book a flight back Europe, while Willie accidentally ends up on a plane himself. The final shot, of one character returning to their motel room to find it empty, is as filled with pitch-black humor as it is a moment of serious regret. The unrelenting bleakness of the film does not posit that this is what life is really like, but that these characters, unable to take true pleasure in anything, can't attain paradise because they don't even know what makes them truly happy.

Jarmusch almost completely hones his minimalistic style with Stranger Than Paradise, and he has an incredible gift for, without moving the camera or throwing any sort of effects into the frame, suggesting a comedic undertone when nothing on-screen would inherently create one. His camera stands outside of America, looking in on its own country with interest and scientific objectivity; Jarmusch does not use his outsider feel to break down the "illusion" of America but to attack those who would blindly believe in that image without looking inside oneself first.

Permanent Vacation

Having previously only seen three films by Jim Jarmusch, one of the filmmakers who, along with Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater and the Coen brothers, set the stage for the American independent explosion of the '90s, I resolved to delve deeper into the filmography of one of the more notable American talents of the last 20 years. His Ghost Dog and Down By Law are interesting, witty, highly literate looks at America through the eyes of those who don't understand it; you'd be forgiven for thinking him a European filmmaker.

That tendency to look at American life through the perspective of a foreign or a loner is evident in the first shots of his first feature, Permanent Vacation: as images of pedestrians moving through New York play in slow motion, the soundtrack of bustling footsteps plays at normal speed. Even here, we, through Jarmusch's camera, cannot process what we're seeing as we see it. Jarmusch casts this New York as the victim of some sort of quasi-apocalypse, the result of a war with the Chinese. Funnily enough, the decay of the sets looks less like the aftermath of a war and more the mass neglect of the city's landlords.

Through the rubble and squalor wanders Aloysius Parker (Chris Parker), who signs his name "Allie" when he sprays graffiti on the walls. Allie tells us that he wants a son so he can name the boy Charlie, after jazz legend Charlie Parker. In his apartment, this young beanpole dances along to Parker's records with a combination of stiff white boy jerks and rhythmic soft shoe. Allie's so lanky and hip that you can't help but be amused by him, but he espouses a decidedly glum worldview.

Allie hasn't slept in days, and when his girlfriend asks him about it, he shrugs her off by saying, "I have my dreams while I'm awake." Searching for some level of meaning in this bombed out, decrepit world, Allie wanders the streets of New York without purpose, stumbling across a bevy of idiosyncratic characters all as removed by madness as Allie is from disillusionment. He speaks with a shellshocked veteran, his institutionalized mother, a hysterical Spanish woman trapped in her own tortured monologue. At last he steals a car, and sells it to buy passage to Paris. As he boards the ship to leave, he remarks to us that he feels like a tourist on "permanent vacation

What's most readily apparent about the film is its commitment to French New Wave styling. Permanent Vacation lacks any identifiable narrative structure, and when a moment of plot presents itself -- the theft of the car -- Jarmusch skips along the story with the same speed as Godard's introduction of Michel and his crime in Breathless. At one point, Allie pops into a theater to see Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents (Jarmusch befriended the director when Ray took up teaching at NYU and even served as his assistant), a literal quotation of film amidst textual and subtextual use. Allie himself plays like a Blank Generation update of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, with his hyper-literacy and his feelings of alienation.

Permanent Vacation was made for $12,000, but it looks and feels like a debut regardless of the budget and film stock. By 1980, New Hollywood was about to implode, collapsing in on the weight of its excess. Jaws and Star Wars shifted focus from more personal filmmaking to merchandised saturation booking, where an auteur could get any amount of money requested for the most indulgent projects under the sun simply on the notion that it would somehow turn a profit. That's not to say that films like Apocalypse Now or Spielberg and Lucas' epics don't have their merits beyond simple ambition and scale, but compare Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver to New York, New York, or Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot to Heaven's Gate.

Jarmusch perhaps seeks to return modern American auteur cinema to the more intimate realms of post-New Wave filmmaking. Unfortunately, its self-absorption is evident from the start, and where a film like Down By Law or even a strung-together anthology like Coffee and Cigarettes contain a hipness in every frame through its intelligence, Permanent Vacation feels the need to call attention to itself at all times. This also is of course indebted to much of French New Wave, which was not only self-reflexive but somehow self-referential about its self-reflexivity (I still haven't made up my mind about Breathless because of its incessant need to point out how daring it is), but it's still distracting at times. But you can't deny Jarmusch's spark, even this early; an artistic and political commentary on an America adrift at the start of the '80s, it steals from Godard, Ozu (Jarmusch conveys one scene through a series of silent, beautiful establishing shots), and Ray among others. As much, if not more, is said through pauses than dialogue, a minimalist approach clearly on display in the stoic hit-man of Ghost Dog. Permanent Vacation is no masterpiece, nor is it even excellent, but it's a promising, intriguing start to an interesting career.