Old friends talk about everything and nothing in particular.
The now twenty-year-old project Coffee and Cigarettes grew out of three shorts that Jim Jarmusch filmed over a few years with his musician and filmmaker friends in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 2000s, he combined them and eight new segments into an anthology of conversations about family relationships, music, addiction, and the laws of physics, featuring Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett and her unknown cousin, Bill Murray and the Wu-Tang Clan talking over the titular coffee and cigarettes. The absurdist and cosmopolitan black-and-white anthology that has since its release gained a cult following premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003.
The coolness of Coffee and Cigarettes is created by people from different worlds (who might have not met if it was not for the film) casually hanging out in and between the film’s segments: Claire Denis’ regular collaborators of Alex Descas and Isaach De Bankolé, American hip-hop musicians GZA and RZA, comedian Steven Wright and Italian director Roberto Benigni, as well as actor Taylor Mead and writer William Rice from the New York avant-garde and no-wave scene, and musicians Meg and Jack White from The White Stripes. Moving freely between the segments and changing roles, celebrities present exaggerated portraits of themselves. Having taken the best from the no wave cinema, to which he was devoted in the beginning of his career—specifically the absence of action and the sterile black-and-white image—Jarmusch created a quirky and relaxed film about the (dis)similarities between people and their stage personas—a meditation on acting and the screen life of celebrities.
The film will be screened in English and French with Russian subtitles.
Coffee and Cigarettes
Director: Jim Jarmusch
USA, Japan, Italy, 2003. 96 min.
16+