What can happen in one night in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki? The short story film by the master of American independent film will tell you.
In A Night on Earth, we meet the extraordinary creative personality of American independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch for the second time. Since the club film Stranger Than Paradise, the filmmaker's idiosyncratic poetics have undergone a certain evolution and his world has opened up to a wider viewing public. Jarmusch's domain remains the genre of black comedy, but the contrast between the "external" fun and the bitterness of "everyday" stories has deepened. However, the director does not abandon the narrative asceticism of a minimum of actors, placed in a few settings and experiencing "nothing" episodes; however, the filmmaker's handling of them is all the more subtle.
Jarmusch's second colour film is divided into five short stories, set simultaneously overnight in different time zones in five major cities (Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki) and in their respective languages. The actors are local taxi drivers and their passengers. Jarmusch subtly paraphrases the typical characters, genres and styles of each cinema (Hollywood, the New York School, French neo-Baroque cinema, big-budget Italian farce, Aki Kaurismäki's Nordic brooding films), which comes through in the narrative rhythm, the accentuation of meaningful motifs, Tom Waits' precise music and the actual cast of "typical" actors of that particular cinema. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes (who has worked on films by David Lynch) makes the most of the necessarily static camera, limiting himself to observing the actors in the taxi environment and to characterising the passing big city streets. The refined narrative structure provides, in only seemingly "random" situations, a picture of a world of paradoxes in which "sighted" blind and homeless people live everywhere, and in which everyone has to cope with feelings of alienation in an environment of false myths.
Night on Earth is a small, wise and highly entertaining film, deserving of the attention of all admirers of good cinema for its intelligence, humour and thought.
Night on Earth
Comedy / Drama / Short Story
USA / France / UK / Germany / Japan, 1991, 129 min
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Programme subject to change.
