Paterson (2016)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
A week in the life of Paterson, a poet bus driver, and his wife Laura, a very creative artist, who live in Paterson, New Jersey, hometown of many famous poets and artists.
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The couple goes out once together, to see the 1932 Island of Lost Souls, after which Paterson compares Laura to the feral, fractured-English-speaking Panther Woman.
The weekend feels no different, except when the couple go to a movie: an old horror flick, “Island of Lost Souls” (1932), which is pretty much the opposite of their domestic routine.
Here it feels like a tic left over from the 20th century — something he all but acknowledges when Paterson and Laura go out to see the 1932 “Island of Lost Souls” at a movie theater.
One night, Paterson and Laura go to the movies to see 1932’s “Island of Lost Souls.”
The jangle of the digital present is all but absent here; even when Paterson and Laura go to the movies, it's a revival of the 1932 horror classic Island of Lost Souls.
At one point, Paterson and Laura go to a local cinema to watch Charles Laughton in Island of Lost Souls , but you can’t really see why movies would matter in these people’s lives.
Having captured the strange suburbia within Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Elmes assists in highlighting the poetic beauty Paterson from Paterson sees within his hometown, which permits Paterson to soak up inspiration from the town and its people for his own poetry.
Frederick Elmes, who previously shot things as stylistically varied as Blue Velvet and The Ice Storm, sticks to muted, warmer tones, recalling faded family snapshots from the 1970s.
The stunning camerawork and expressive lighting by Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet; River’s Edge; Synecdoche, New York) add further dimensions to Jarmusch’s storytelling, and the original music written and performed by Carter Logan, Sqürl, and Jarmusch lend Paterson a noodling quality that provides an aural equivalent to the reworking of lines of verse.
Lensed with a painter's eye by the great Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet"), the movie conveys an aura of Blakean mysticism through such homely sources as an 8-by-10 mugshot of Lou Costello; the connections to previous Jarmusch releases — Masatoshi Nagase, the Carl Perkins fan of the made-in-Memphis "Mystery Train," returns as a tourist — posit the film as the latest chapter in a bemused serial epic that is Knausgårdian in its appreciation of life's epiphanies and humiliations.
It’s a Groundhog Day-like existence, numbing and constricted, but Jarmusch makes it seem as if Paterson is his very own garden of Eden.
The film follows Paterson for seven days, and it’s almost like a crazy-mirror version of “Groundhog Day” in which every morning is a pleasure, an act of quiet satisfaction to get up at the same time, go to the same job, jot poems in the same notebook, make small talk with the same people, and go home to the same beloved wife to see what new interior design project or dubious recipe she will have embarked on today.
Imagine a version of “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray’s prickly frustration replaced by Driver’s soulful reserve, and you’re halfway there.
I’m not the first to notice this film’s formal resemblance to Groundhog Day (Variety’s Justin Chang got there first ).
I think Jarmusch has actually remade “Groundhog Day” as a work of spiritual ecstasy.
Whether it’s Mystery Train , Dead Man, Ghost Dog , The Limits of Control or Only Lovers Left Alive , they’re movies populated by self-contained, romantic (but rarely carnal) loners who inhabit strangely deserted and melancholy landscapes.
Since Stranger than Paradise, the 1984 comedy that gestured half-heartedly in the direction of road movie and buddy movie without committing to either, his work (including the western Dead Man and the vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive) has occupied a kind of negative space, defined more by what it isn’t than by what it is.
His characters are often loners ( Only Lovers Left Alive ), reprobates (Down by Law) or more often than not, misanthropes (Broken Flowers and Stranger than Paradise).
In his best work (“Stranger Than Paradise,” “Mystery Train,” the recent “Only Lovers Left Alive”), that undead Jarmusch pace was organic.
Anticipation was high for Jim Jarmusch‘s follow up to Only Lovers Left Alive, and though it feels very different than any of the auteur’s previous films, Paterson does not disappoint.
They have always operated on their own laconic timeline, whether John Lurie’s beat slacker from Stranger Than Paradise, Bill Murray’s baffled depressive from Broken Flowers or the vampire beauties of Only Lovers Left Alive.
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This is followed by a variety of bus passenger conversations overheard during Paterson’s shift (featuring the now-adolescent Moonrise Kingdom actors Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), followed by his commute to a local bar while walking Laura’s disgruntled dog.
Whatever the real Paterson may be like, the fanciful city portrayed here suggests a shabbier, more racially diverse version of Woody Allen's imaginary Manhattan: a bohemian fairyland of farmer's markets and chess tournaments, where a cinema shows old horror films on Saturday nights, a little girl cites Emily Dickinson and a teenage couple – played by the leads from Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom – proves improbably well-versed in local history.
On the number 23 bus Paterson drives we meet a grown up Suzy and Sam (Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman) from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom , as they discuss Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci.
Paterson isn’t totally free of cameos or celebrity cachet; Method Man shows up for one scene, spitting rhythms at the laundromat as an aspiring emcee, and the film also quietly arranges a Moonrise Kingdom reunion, as a kind of communion with a kindred spirit of American deadpan.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) after ” Moonrise Kingdom ” ended, well, I can happily confirm that they are still together and attending college in Paterson, NJ, where they ride the bus and talk knowledgeably about late-1800s Italian-American anarchist leader, and sometime Paterson resident, Gaetano Bresci.
It contains many little treats, from a tribute to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom to a tribute to the Wu Tang-Clan.
Farahani is quite adorable as Laura in a similar way as Maria de Medeiros was in Pulp Fiction, in that her precocious nature makes it hard to get angry about her sometimes selfish and erratic behavior.(Coincidentally…
That’s especially so at Paterson’s home, where his partner and muse Laura (Golshifteh Farahani, channeling the playfully alluring foreign ingenue that Maria de Medeiros brought so vivaciously to life as Butch’s girlfriend Fabienne in “Pulp Fiction”) undertakes a different art project each day, mostly turning whatever it is she touches (curtains, cupcakes or a random wall in the small ranch home) into a black-and-white tiled mosaic, and the racially integrated bar where a pantheon of Paterson’s famous are hung as photos above the till.
Paterson and Laura together remind a bit of the relationship between Butch and Fabienne in Pulp Fiction --or, at least, Laura reminds me a great deal of Fabienne.
Paterson at times recalls Richard Linklater’s Slacker, another story about characters casually going about their day.
Of course, most of this smacks of wish-fulfilment – and the idea of the hidden village within the city recalls Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke – but it’s a timely antidote to the kind of pumped up misery that is usually paraded as authenticity itself (see American Honey).
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Driver, who is most famous now for playing Star Wars villain Kylo Ren, is ideally cast as a figure who seems slightly out of step with the digital age (he refuses to even back up his notebook of poems).
En términos narrativos, la película cuenta la historia de un tal Paterson (Adam Driver, en una performance muy contenida en relación a lo que hace en GIRLS o STAR WARS) que vive en la ciudad de Paterson, New Jersey, cuna del poeta William Carlos Williams.
El actor de la serie Girls y, sí, el Kylo Ren de la última Star Wars interpreta a un chofer que vive con su bienintencionada y servicial novia Laura (la iraní Golshifteh Farahani), una chica que se la pasa diseñando cosas en blanco y negro y cocinando cupcakes, y con un bulldog que es protagonista fundamental de la historia.
The cinematography by Frederic Elmes, who started out doing “Eraserhead” with David Lynch and has partnered with Jarmusch on several projects, captures the town in somber, reflective ways that mirror Paterson’s words and Williams’ observations.