POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE FILM EVER : "PERMANANT VACATION"

The thing about the art of Jim Jarmusch, is that it often speaks more of things that are felt as opposed to “known”. And if you’re not quite sure what that means (and believe me I wouldn’t blame you), I strongly recommend you watch Permanent Vacation. If you do, you will find yourself in the rather strange situation I find myself in right now. The film is 72 minutes long, and if you are like me in your taste of film, you will have watched it “in one gulp” as it were; yet if anyone asks you what it was about, you will be unable to answer exactly. It is about a feeling, a state of being… A state of constant drifting, being unable to belong, being on permanent vacation…
The “owner” of these feelings is Allie Parker. He is a young man of about 18, and before you get the wrong impression, he is not sad because he is this way. This is just the way he is. He is very “cool” about the whole thing and very much embodies the detached and disillusioned generation that accompanied the yuppies who were on the “up and up” in 1980, when the film was made… Allie reckons some people can kid themselves, hide their loneliness with work, ambition, various other things, but really we all drift, and we are all alone… This is not a particularly sad state of affairs, not for Allie anyway; there are many good things in life as well, like music for instance and interesting people… But this is the way it is, like it or lump it… If that looks sad to you from where you’re standing, well… That’s your problem… Not Allie’s…
During the film, we just follow Allie around as he roams the streets of his hometown. The drift is about to take him again, he can feel it coming, but before he succumbs to it (and he always does), he wants to visit his old home. He wants to see his mother. He wants to walk around town for a while. So we wander around with him, with him, we connect with all the people he meets, from his girlfriend who is very much disillusioned with him to his mother and her roommate in a lunatic asylum, to random crazy people off the street. Allie connects with all of them with the same ease, openness and detachment – as far as he is concerned, we are all a little mad anyway…
It’s hard to believe this was Jarmusch’s first feature film. Originally, it was a short film that he shot as a graduation project; he then built on it and lengthened it. In it, apart from a philosophy that is actually a lot deeper than it pretends to be, you will find fascinating camerawork and a very classy minimalist esthetic. I have read it said of Yazujiro Ozu, the great Japanese minimalist director, that one could stop any of his films at a random place and they still would actually qualify as a work of art; I don’t know if this is exactly true of Jarmusch, but it comes pretty damn close… I would go as far as saying it was worth watching for that alone… But don’t be disheartened by the subject matter and definitely don’t imagine this is a sad film… Thought provoking yes. But not sad; as Allie says, this is life and really there isn’t all that much to explain – there isn’t that much you can explain… You have to live it and feel for yourself…