Stranger than paradise (movie review)

Stranger than paradise (comedy) (1984) (1 hr 25 mins)

Director Jim Jarmusch is a leading figure in American independent film-making and is probably best known to a mainstream audience for Broken flowers (2005) starring Bill Murray. But he first came to people’s attention with Stranger than paradise, his second film. It was made on a tiny budget of $125,000 and Jarmusch also wrote the screenplay.

Filmed in black and white, the film has Jarmusch’s trademark slow pacing and focus on mood and characters above plot. The story is straightforward. Willie (John Lurie) lives in New York and spends his time in card games and at race tracks with his friend Eddie (Richard Edson). He’s irritated by the arrival of his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) from Hungary. He has to put her up for ten days while his aunt is in hospital. Willie resents her being there but grows used to her as the ten days unfold.

One year on, Willie and Eddie win hundreds of dollars by cheating in a game of poker and decide to visit Eva in Cleveland. But when they get there they are as bored as they were back in New York. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, they troop along with Eva to the cinema, much to the annoyance of Eva’s friend Billy. Billy ends up paying for them; they repay him by eating his popcorn.

Willie and Eddie decide to drive to Florida and persuade Eva to come with them. While they’re blowing their money at the dog track, Eva comes into some money by chance and decides to go to the airport and catch a flight to Europe. Willie and Eddie rush to the airport to stop her, with comic results.

The comedy in the film is very dry and understated. Willie and Eva don’t seem to know what to make of each other. Eddie seems interested in her but can’t manage to articulate his feelings for her. The locations are strangely uninhabited, almost ghostly. Run-down sections of New York are succeeded by desolate parts of Cleveland and empty parts of Florida. As Eddie comments to Willie as they leave Cleveland, ‘You know, it's kind of funny. You're some place new, and everything looks just the same.' It is perhaps this sense of being trapped that binds Willie, Eddie and Eva together. And as the film closes, for all their modest efforts to escape to somewhere different, they all end up somewhere they don’t want to be.

The film is punctuated with breaks between scenes where the screen is black, a kind of film equivalent to the white spaces between words in a text. The spaces themselves are what give the action meaning.

The film won the Camera d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 National Film Critics Award for Best Film. Perhaps Jarmusch’s greatest achievement in this film is to make the viewer care about characters who say and do nothing of consequence.

 Rating: 9/10