Stranger Than Paradise.

Review #1472: Stranger Than Paradise.

Cast:
John Lurie (Willie), Eszter Balint (Eva), Richard Edson (Eddie), Cecillia Stark (Aunt Lotte), Danny Rosen (Billy), Rammellzee (Man With Money), and Tom DiCillo (Airline Agent) Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch.

Review: 
"I have no desire to make films for any kind of specific audience. What I want to do is make films that... tell stories, but somehow in an new way, not in a predictable form, not in the usual manipulative way that films seem to on their audiences."

Regardless of how a film turns out, it generally to be a good idea to try and reach as many distinct voices of film as possible, and this can prove especially true for certain directors. For independent cinema, it certainly never hurts to think about Jim Jarmusch as a key figure for his transgressive work as a director who focuses on mood with characters in minimalist tone rather than narrative structure, having done fifteen feature films in four decades with a described goal to "approximate real time for the audience", who had shifted his focus from literature and music to film. There were a few inspirations that led Jarmusch on the way to inspiration in film, with the first film he has a vivid memory of being Thunder Road (1958). Key figures included people such as the director Nicholas Ray, who Jarmusch became a teaching assistant for while at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He would be a crewman on Ray's last film (a collaboration with Wim Wenders) with Lightning Over Water (1980), a documentary about Ray's last years. In the same year of its release, he directed his first film in Permanent Vacation (which had a premiere but no theatrical release), which was done just after leaving the Tisch School. The film is comprised of single-shot scenes (for which Jarmusch edited along with Melody London) that was done a budget of $125,000, arising from a short subject film that he had done in 1982 that was originally 30 minutes long (having being granted leftover film stock from Wim Winders).

One can certainly appreciate the time and effort made in doing a film with a distinct style that dares to be something different. This is a film of the arthouse, one with a jazz singer, a violinist and a drummer to comprise a main trio (with Lurie being the only one having acted before and composing the music). If one wants to sit through somethign different for 89 minutes, all power to you. However, I simply just could not find myself liking this film, a supposed absurdist comedy that drives one numb to the point of exhaustion of how middling it is. If one takes films as escapism, this might be an example of one that makes you never want to leave home again, where presenting location shots of New York, Cleveland, and Florida all muddles together as one for others to be bored with (personally, only the middle one of those three sounds like it could turn out fine). It may very well prove a divine experience in boredom, and while one might say that is the point, that doesn't make it something I actually enjoy. I can respect Jarmusch for sticking to what he believes in when it comes to fierce independence that eschews the Hollywood system while having resemblance to types of world cinema, for which one could likely use as a way to recommend it to others. But it felt dull average to me, where the resistance to sleep nearly fell under itself in watching folks that are only barely interesting when not bored like hipsters (which I loathe at times). Balint proves to be the favorite, one wrapped with charm as a curiosity of circumstance for a film that mumbles about and about. Honestly, this is a frustrating film to think about because of how hard it is to really crack open and do proper justice in talking about it without just saying I didn't like it (it's a road movie of sorts with worse luck for its characters than I ever had on the road with incidentally just about as much as reaching humor as a growing hipster). The best thing I can say is that common sense rules the day for attempting to check this film out: if you are into what Jarmusch is selling with his style of filmmaking, then you will find something worth a curiosity as opposed to my general understanding of disappointment.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.