An early film by the cult American director, which would define his style for years to come.
Winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Willie and Eddie are typical inhabitants of downtown New York in the 1980s. They loaf around, live in cheap, rundown apartments, and make money hustling and gambling. The leisurely rhythm of their life is disrupted by the arrival of Willie’s cousin from Hungary, who is on her way to their aunt in Cleveland. Having earned a little money, Eddie and Willie decide to accompany her and take a short trip with no particular aim.
Permanent Vacation is the title of Jarmusch’s previous, debut feature, but it could easily be the title of this one. The film appeared thanks to Wim Wenders, who Jarmusch met when working as an assistant to Nicholas Ray, his teacher, on his last film. Ray was one of the key American postwar directors, whose films included Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause. Having seen something of himself in the young independent director, Wenders gave him the remaining film stock from The State of Things, a bitter but ironic reflection on his own bad experience of working in America. This is how the first, New York part of Stranger Than Paradise appeared. It was originally planned as a short, but then Jarmusch added another two parts in a strange rethink of the road movie genre. In his interpretation, movement leads nowhere and changes nothing, and is engendered only by the characters’ alienation from each other and the world. The motif of the wanderer, the stranger, the immigrant, which would later become central for Jarmusch, embodies the nerve of his philosophy: the world belongs to wanderers to whom nothing belongs. The cinematographer of his first two films and of one of the novellas in the almanac Coffee and Cigarettes, Tom DiCillo, made a significant contribution to the development of appropriate visual poetics. He would later also become an independent director, known particularly for Johnny Suede (1991) with Brad Pitt and Living in Oblivion (1995) with Steve Buscemi. Faded like an old newspaper, the black-and-white images, shot on 16 mm film and enlarged to 35 mm, the slow, long shots with characters coming in and out, and the focus on textures would go on to be Jarmusch’s house style for many years.
Stranger Than Paradise
Director Jim Jarmusch
USA, 1984, 89 min. 16+