"DOWN BY LAW" AND HOW TO GET BACK UP AGAIN...

Now, having met Allie and got to know his philosophy slightly better, we jump forward a few years and see what he may become when he grows up. And as if to break the mood of deep philosophy of the previous film, we see quite clearly that the result needn’t be tragic or very thought provoking… Down by law is qualified as one of the “coolest comedies” ever, with an even cooler cast – and if you ever thought that there could be no such thing as a truly funny minimalist comedy, well, prepared to be proved wrong.
Zack (played by legendary musician Tom Waits) is a DJ. He is basically very much like Allie Parker from Permanent Vacation all grown up. The only trouble is that he is lacking slightly in Allie’s maturity and his girlfriend has had enough of his attitude and kicked him out of their flat. Jack (John Lurie) is a pimp. But again, he has no great ambition and drifts through life, things seem to be going well, he’s cool, he’s hip… Various hitches and “setbacks” later, these two misfits will end up as cellmates in jail. At first, their great similarity means that they rub each other the wrong way, but this soon transforms into something akin to “brotherhood”; while goading each other and bickering nearly constantly, they are deep down good friends. Things change dramatically when they are joined by a third cellmate: Roberto (Roberto Begnini). Roberto can only speak very broken English, phrases of which he religiously writes down in his “phrasebook”. Unlike his cellmates, he is anything but “cool”, he talks constantly and can be best likened to a well-meaning Labrador. But just as his cellmates are trying to decide whether to like him or loathe him, something unexpected happens: a chance for escape presents itself and our three cellmates grab at it… The question is, will they be able to put their various differences to one side and escape in one piece?
It’s part of Jarmusch’s originality that after setting out a certain thing, a certain outlook on life in a quite sober way in one film, he can turn around and use it as a mainstay of comedy in another film… Although I must admit I somehow suspect that later on in life Jarmusch decided that the comedy side of the “cool” attitude to life was more important than its philosophy because in quite a few films I have seen he puts a “cool” character and a “totally uncool” one side by side – or portray a character trying to be cool but actually not really managing… As you can imagine, this a typical “clash of characters” film, with Roberto Begnini providing the comic contretemps to the ultra-cool Zack and Jack. It is rather telling that, ok warning, a small spoiler, that at the end of the film Roberto is the one who is “successful” as in he is the one who actually manages something concrete, Jack and Zack however will, shall we say, continue to drift to unsure futures in pretty much the same way they were at the beginning of the film…
In all the Jarmusch films I have watched, one thing that always strikes me greatly is the attention to detail. Since this is a minimalist film with minimum points distracting from the main story, the small details naturally gain great importance and one can sit back and savor a cleverly planted gesture or expression from one of the actors or a prop of some description, cleverly inserted into the foray… And again – I cannot say this often enough – something should be said about Jarmusch’s cinematography, this time even more striking in black and white…

JUST ANOTHER "NIGHT ON EARTH"

Great minimalist director Jim Jarmusch once asked, I have read, why, if life hasn’t got “themes” and “storylines” films should be obliged to have them. This statement could well be the recipe for disaster in the hands of a novice or someone who wasn’t quite sure of what they were doing. In the hands of Jarmusch, however, it becomes the starting point for some of the most original and beautiful works of art in cinematic history. Now, a lot of you probably know that Jim Jarmush is a minimalist. And as such, not all his works are exactly easy to watch. Night on Earth however, is a comedy. It is, in actual fact, a sensitively filmed series of short stories that come together to make a story of a short space of time cut out of one night on planet earth… Doesn’t that actually sound a bit like what life is to you? It sure does to me…
When starting filming, Jarmusch makes his point of inspiration particularly clear; on the wall there are five clocks. You know the types; they usually have them in massive multi-national corporations and show the times in all the big capitals and important cities in the world. Here we have Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. It is seven p.m. in L.A., ten p.m. in New York, 4 a.m. in Paris, 4 a.m. again in Rome and 5 a.m. in Helsinki. Just at this same moment, five taxi drivers are driving along in five cities. Corky, a sassy young lady cab-driver in L.A. has just picked up a big Hollywood casting agent from the airport; Helmut, a migrant from Eastern Germany to New York whose driving skills have a lot to be desired, has picked up his first customer ever, Yo-yo, who wants to go to Brooklyn; in Paris, a young cab-driver from the Ivory Coast has just about had enough of the two arrogant and drunk dignitaries in the back of his cab, in Rome a hyperactive and slightly quirky cab driver is heading off to pick up a priest from one of the city squares and in Helsinki gruff looking driver Mika has just picked up three rather drunken friends and is wondering how to get them home and, more to the point, where he should take them. What follows is funny, touching, surreal or maybe just plain weird. But it is all simply part of a night on earth…
I spoke about Turkish minimalist director Nuri Bilge Ceylan a few weeks back; this is a totally different take on the genre. Or “type of film” as it were. There are no prolonged silences (and some of Jarmusch’s films contain those by the cart-load, but not this one) and general air of sadness. Jarmusch has somehow given what is, to me anyway, the essence of the night in a big city. It is in those small hours when all the good folks are in bed, the weird, the bad and the slightly mad become more and more conspicuous. There are no distractions; we can concentrate on their stories. And this is what these films are largely about: concentrating on one thing. Of course this is a large risk as the stories take place only in the cabs, in some of the cases there is dialogue, but in a few cases one or another of the characters carries the entire weight of the segment in a monologue. This is why, no doubt, Jarmush opted for actors such as Winona Rider, Roberto Begnini (one of his staple cast – I am not a massive fan of Begnini but here, the part fits him like a glove. He is actually one of the actors who has a monologue and not a dialogue so his task is tough, but credit where it is due, I cannot imagine anyone doing a better job of it), Isaach de Bankolé and Beatrice Dalle among others… This is for those of you who want something simple and beautiful. True, the stories don’t “come together” as it were in a magnificent climax but they peacefully co-exist and are definitely part of a whole… Like life. Real life.