Stranger than Paradise
I just finished watching Jim Jarmusch's film, Stranger than Paradise. For whatever reason, it's Jarmusch's work that inspired director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) to initially become a filmmaker. In fact, Clerks is almost a direct rip-off of Jarmusch's visual style. Stranger than Paradise received the Camera d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival when it came out, but how it received such an honor, I'll never know. The whole film is shot only in medium & wide proscenium shots. It's all objective. The camera never shows anything from the actors' points of view, so it's like watching a stage play as a member of the audience . Then there's no second Act. The second Act of a story is typically when the conflict is introduced (at the start of the Act), and where it is escalated (at the end of the Act.) Stranger than Paradise has a premise (Act I) and a "resolve" (Act III), but no conflict whatsoever. It's narrative structure is like vague scenes strung together with brief moments of the screen going black. (The beginning of the film has a very French New Wave feel to it, but lacks any real dramatic structure.) The lack of conflict REALLY starts to wear thin REALLY quick!
You can tell a lot of the dialogue was improvised because there were some continuity errors. In one scene the female lead buys a hat, returns to her hotel room, and then leaves again, leaving the hat behind. In the next scene, her cousin & his friend return to the hotel room, see the hat (which they'd never seen before) and remark, "That looks like Eva's hat!" (The same actor who said "That looks like Eva's hat" then quickly tries to recover by saying, "Did she buy a hat?!" Pathetic!)
All in all, I'd say skip this film at all costs! I simply do not see the brilliance that both Smith and Cannes saw in it. I may, however, still give one of Jarmusch's other films, Down By Law, a shot, only because it has the eccentric singer / actor Tom Waits in it. Unfortunately, there is no such personality to redeem this film.
