STRANGER THAN PARADISE (62)

Directed by: Jim Jarmusch (1984)

Starring: John Lurie, Eszter Balint, Richard Edson, Cecilia Stark

The Pitch: A young slacker drifts from New York to Cleveland to Florida with his Hungarian cousin and equally aimless buddy.

Theo Sez: Could be a case of video proving inadequate to a film's fragile atmosphere, but this ennui-laden, rather dated comedy comes across as essence-of-Jarmusch, the plain (albeit tasty) base he later built on to create bigger and better pizzas : the characters' stasis isn't allegorised, as it is in DEAD MAN (where it served as poetic limbo between Life and Death), but nor is it even disrupted on a basic level by a burst of energy, like Benigni's motormouth in DOWN BY LAW (Stark's character is a step in that direction but remains marginal, perhaps because her words are incomprehensible), or even an incongruously florid line of dialogue (like "I feel a little discombobulated," from MYSTERY TRAIN) - the film seems to lack internal tension, operating within a very limited emotional range. Partly the point, of course, emotional numbness being the main theme - connected to rootlessness, alienation both from self and environment and perhaps even the dead-end of Warholian hipster posturing (the film's style seems to come in quotation marks, as if it were itself responsible for what it's reflecting) - but its portrait of a world where "you go someplace new and everything looks just the same" is all too convincing ; lots of good stuff, but it still felt like hard work extracting much enjoyment out of it. Obviously didn't help that it features one of my pet dislikes, the guy who acts like a jerk and the girl who takes it (BUFFALO 66 fans may not mind too much), and - even more obviously - that I saw it after all the other Jarmusch films when in fact it pre-dates them. That's probably where the trouble lies, actually...