Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Giancarlo Esposito in Night on Earth

Béatrice Dalle and Isaach De Bankolé in Night on Earth

Paolo Bonicelli and Roberto Benigni in Night on Earth

Matti Pellonpäá in Night on Earth

Victoria Snelling: Gena Rowlands
Corky: Winona Ryder
Helmut Grokenberger: Armin Mueller-Stahl
YoYo: Giancarlo Esposito
Angela: Rosie Perez
Paris Cab Driver: Isaach De Bankolé
Blind Woman: Béatrice Dalle
Rome Cab Driver: Roberto Benigni
Priest: Paolo Bonacelli
Mika: Matti Pellonpää
Man No. 1: Kari Väänänen
Man No. 2: Sakari Kuosmanen
Man No. 3: Tomi Salmela

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz
Music: Tom Waits

I guess people don't smoke in taxis anymore -- at least in tobacco-hostile America -- so Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth probably evokes a kind of nostalgie de la boue in smokers or ex-smokers. Everyone lights up in the five segments of the movie, although Los Angeles resident Victoria Snelling at least chides her driver, Corky, for indulging the habit -- only to light up her own after Corky sarcastically refers to her as "Ma." Perhaps Victoria's advice crosses some kind of line between passenger and cabbie. In Rome, it will be the cabbie who crosses the line, persuading his priest-passenger to hear his taxicab confession, an experience that will bring about the priest's demise. In New York, passenger YoYo even becomes the cabbie, taking over the wheel from the incompetent driver, new immigrant Helmut Grokenberger. At least in Paris and Helsinki the old conventions remain, although Isaach De Bankolé's driver is infuriated at the liberties some of his passengers take with him, especially the well-to-do Africans who taunt him for his lowly Côte d'Ivoire origins. In Helskini there's a kind of working-class solidarity between Mika and his drunken passengers, one of whom has not only just been fired but has also learned that his daughter is pregnant and his wife has left him. What do all of these slices of life add up to? That's one of the charms of reflecting on an anthology film like Night on Earth, in which discrete segments seem to echo and enlarge one another. One of the reasons that taxicabs are so effective a setting for movies is that they can become crucibles for temporary relationships, moments out of time and space that seem more freighted with meaning than they really are -- Roberto Benigni's cabbie makes the resemblance of taxi to confessional booth part of his appeal to the priest. Put together five such moments, in five distinct cities, and you have something that looks like a statement about our common humanity. Although each segment neatly evokes the character of its particular city -- the glitz of LA, the grubby hopefulness of New York, the weary cosmopolitanism of Paris, the religion-steeped past and skeptical present of Rome, the chilly Cold War-haunted between-two-worlds quality of Helsinki -- the space and time inside their taxicabs seems oddly universal. That's what I love about Jarmusch's movies: Long after you've watched them, you're still savoring the details while bemused about the whole.

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach De Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Michael Hogan, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Katy Hansz, The GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, William Rice, Taylor Mead

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop, Mark Friedberg, Tom Jarmusch

For Jarmusch fans only. Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of 11 black-and-white short films in which people sit at tables and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, began as semi-improvisatory shorts spun off from Jarmusch's features by their crew and cast members and friends. Starting with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright essentially winging it in "Strange to Meet You," the collection evolved from a series of shaggy-dog sketches into more structured narratives with a few motifs echoing throughout. The most structured is certainly "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays two roles: the soigné movie star Cate and her blowsier cousin Shelly, who resents Cate's privileged life. They meet in the coffee shop of a luxury hotel, where Cate patiently endures Shelly's sniping until she's called away for an interview. Shelly has been smoking throughout their conversation, but when she lights up after Cate leaves, a waiter tells her that smoking is forbidden there. The episode "Cousins?" is a parallel story in which Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, two British actors trying to make it in the States, meet for coffee, during which Molina reveals to a very unimpressed Coogan that he has done genealogical research which proves they are distant relations. After an excited fan asks for his autograph, Coogan becomes more and more condescending toward Molina. Then Molina receives a call on his cell phone from Spike Jonze, instantly deflating Coogan's ego to the point that Molina leaves him to pay the check. Amusing as these vignettes are, they don't rise much beyond the level of anecdotes, and some of the other episodes, such as the ones in which Jack White demonstrates his Tesla coil or Renee French fends off a too-attentive waiter, fall flat. Still, if you don't expect too much, there's an evanescent charm to the whole project.

Watched on Showtime

Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)

At the end of Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989), his young Japanese tourists set out for New Orleans, where the writer-director had been three years earlier to make Down by Law. As he did with Memphis for Mystery Train, Jarmusch imagined the city and wrote his screenplay before he ever set foot in New Orleans, and the resulting film is a kind of fleshing out of his imagination. Jarmusch's New Orleans is a construct of legend and myth, then, not to be taken literally any more than one would a fairy tale -- which is what Jarmusch has called Down by Law.  He imagines New Orleans as a city of musicians, prostitutes, and tourists, and he casts his three central characters in the mode of each: Tom Waits as Zack, an out-of-work disc jockey; John Lurie as Jack, a small-time pimp; and Roberto Benigni as Roberto, or Bob, an Italian wandering the city to soak up American idiom, which he dutifully writes down in his notebook. But if Jarmusch's New Orleans is an imaginary construct, it is grounded in a kind of visual reality, provided at the film's beginning by Robby Müller's camera as it roams the streets of the city, showing the signs of decay it exhibited even before Katrina. And the scenes that establish Zack and Jack are rooted in a sordid poverty, as Zack is kicked out of their apartment by his girlfriend, Laurette (Ellen Barkin), and Jack is lured into a trap in which he is arrested with an underage prostitute he has never met before. (Bob makes a kind of cameo appearance in a scene with Zack, thoroughly stoned and out on the street, who tells him to "buzz off" -- a phrase Bob records in his notebook.) After Zack is tricked into driving a car that has a body in the trunk, he joins Jack in the Orleans Parish Prison, where things look like they can't get any worse. But then Bob joins them in their cell, having been arrested for killing a man with a billiard ball in a pool hall fracas, and the film turns on a dime from a noirish study of the underclass into an off-beat comedy that, among other things, validated Benigni's Italian reputation as a comic genius. Here he's a catalyst, stirring Waits and Lurie into performances that raise their characters from sleazy to endearing. But the real star of the film for me is Müller, whose black-and-white cinematography also elevates the sordid into the beautiful. It becomes a film of textures, from the silken skin of a nude prostitute to the etched graffiti on a prison cell wall to the layer of duckweed on the surface of a bayou. In an interview, Müller has commented on how black-and-white has an effect of subtraction: Color gives you more information than you need, while black-and-white helps you concentrate on particulars. Down by Law has been criticized for its slowness, and Jarmusch certainly lets the tension slack a little, but even when there's nothing much going on, Müller's images keep the pulse of life steady.