A movie that watches you Beautiful abstraction. If earlier Jarmusch had texture, conversations, games with face and words, the irony of fate and the French art of living in the American marginal without a plot, now it is a plot without a texture. This is not even a Zen-style road movie, but a trip built on a fabulous, archetypal pattern - a hero, a path, significant fellow travelers and an undefined goal at the end. The main intrigue is where he travels in terms of dimensions of human existence and what is the point of arrival? Formally, Isaac de Bancole ("Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai...) plays the role of an assassin who received an order-quest for a certain odious personality. In this interpretation, you cease to believe in fifteen minutes, and, most likely, if the previous films of Jarmusch are in the baggage, then even before the credits. The black killer practically does not eat, walks in perfectly ironed suits from Dolce & Gabbana and does not sleep (this is already alarming, because lack of sleep is a sure sign of dreaming). It walks a lot and is periodically reflected in monochrome surfaces (maze of reflections). The hero of Bernal will deliberately decipher this, saying that the reflection is more real than the prototype.
In general, all the characters, with their charisma and mystery, in fact, “stupid cardboard” – people-ideas. They are not companions, but rather guides. Each of them pronounces a speech on a given topic - music, art, science, bohemian, spiritual hallucinogens (peyote and Castaneda). With the characters, the hero exchanges matchboxes, from which he extracts pieces of paper with incomprehensible numbers and beeches. The labels of barter items depict a black boxer. The parallel for me is clear – Isaac is walking the path of a spiritual warrior. Pieces of paper are a metaphor and banter for “intellectual chatter as a form of being.” We like to talk cleverly about smart topics, but we essentially exchange meaningless and useless codes. That is why the spiritual Assassin does not change boxes with flamenco dancers - with them there was a real exchange. No codes or words. Mysterious and two cups of coffee, which invariably ordered the hero. Each creature is paired. For me, it is a symbol of the duality of worlds (similar to reflections) and a sign of aesthetics. The spiritual path will be traversed to the end, in which Jarmusch will quite clearly decipher what is already clear - rationalization and naive human "inclination" to objectivity, control over reality, which is a series of accidents - will be strangled.
It turns out that Jarmusch shot a kind of analogue of “Black Square”. It's more of an idea than a masterpiece. Bancolet looks at Picasso and the canvas covered with a white sheet with equal enthusiasm. Jarmusch offered the right way to view his masterpiece. Life is a road with a change of landscapes and interlocutors, in which nothing happens - an art even more than what we used to think of them. That there is traditional Jim humor in the film, I don't agree. Jarmusch is more serious than ever and it doesn't suit him. He, of course, breaks through - for example, the elegant stamping of the murder subject in the case of a musical instrument. And the most brilliant joke is the reflection of the hero and the viewer as in a mirror. The person who will watch the film is supposed to have the same stone face as the main character (it is impossible to calculate ten facial changes in Bancole in two hours). Jarmusch and cooperation with Doyle, who operated with Kar Vai and Antonioni. Sterile dead beauty. Before that, he had a natural “disheveledness”, for which painstaking thoughtfulness was only guessed, then there is already a “layout”, in which every movement of the hairdresser is visible. And, in general, I get disheartened when a brilliant director starts making films to explain all his previous films. And begins to fall into self-repeats (" Don't you speak Spanish?/) "Do you have tobacco?" etc.
For those who haven’t read the previous three paragraphs... The film is about the fact that life is a handful of dust, it is worth nothing and about the pathetic attempts of pathetic people to give it value. I made a lot of complaints about Jarmusch’s fresh work, but he has already answered them. “He who thinks he is better than others should go to the cemetery.” Nice route, Jim. The film, I guess, is brilliant.
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