Jim Jarmusch is one of the few film directors who may be (slightly) better known than any of the films he’s made, which include Down by Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and, most recently, Broken Flowers, which managed to gross over $13 million in the United States. Despite that modest success, Jarmusch has moved no closer to the mainstream, and this faux-noir drama maintains the minimalist style his films exemplify.
My feeling watching this was that Jarmusch had gotten ahold of a half-finished David Mamet script and stretched it out to a two-hour length. Specifically, there is a stylish, sophisticated, nearly silent lead (Isaach De Bankolé, possibly employing his native Ivory Coast accent) who is sent to Spain. Maybe he’s a hit man, maybe an art thief, maybe it doesn’t matter. He meets a series of persons, each of whom greets him by asking whether he speaks Spanish (he doesn’t), leaves him with a scrap of paper, and in between imparts a bit of philosophy. Jarmusch seems to get self-referential when one (Tilda Swinton in femme fatale mode) says that she likes it when actors don’t say anything. She likes Hitchcock too, but if you know Jarmusch you won’t be expecting any high-tension conclusion. And there isn’t, although the the plot is sort of tied up, if not entirely explained.
Jarmusch hasn’t so much made a movie as a collection of influences—the 1967 film Point Blank, for one—and recurring motifs, including song lyrics, matchboxes, a mysterious, nude young woman, expresso orders, and the tai chi practiced by the lead. It is to a normal thriller as tai chi is to ice hockey. Of course, the director’s movies have all been deliberately paced, but this one is also repetitive and pretentious. It’s very stylish, and strikingly shot; the meaning of the characters and the symbolism and the location and the murder—there is one—should provide hours of fodder for those thusly inclined. But by the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t.
IMDB link
viewed 5/24/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/28/09
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