I first encountered Stranger than Paradise in a Intro to Film tutorial - - I think it was for the week on cinematography. It was only the opening scene, but the visual style grabbed me right away. The grainy black and white, looking not like a 1980s feature film but rather newsreel of some mid-century atrocity, the long opening shot of Eszter Balint's Eva walking away from the airport like an angel of death, the almost-surreal scene of her walking through the streets blaring "I Put A Spell On You"... it stuck with me. A few years later, I finally got around to watching the film in its entirety. The visual style fades after a while and becomes invisible in the way cinematography tends to. But what emerges in its place is a slow but devastating character drama.
Stranger than Paradise is really about the immigrant experience in America. In this way it is a strange, low-key response to The Godfather. Whereas Coppola saw the story of the immigrant as one of struggle, seduction, and eventual corruption -- a Hollywood tragedy, in other words -- Jarmusch argues that it is a grind, an endless procession of ungrateful relatives, incomprehensible television, dead-end jobs, and the slow realization that no matter where you go, the banality of real life is always there ahead of you.
Jarmusch was a pioneer in independent American cinema. The style of Stranger than Paradise is echoed in any of the countless "mumblecore" films that deal with the mundanity of contemporary existence (and perhaps existence in general). It is frequently a boring film, mainly because it is about boredom and its omnipresence. Certainly it could be aesthetically improved, so that the dialogue and the characters have the same artistic grace as the cinematography. But somehow I like Stranger than Paradise just as it is. Instead of the catharsis of Hollywood, it leaves the viewer with an emptiness, a strange hole in their gut that they can't quite figure out what to do with. But maybe that hole was always there, and the film only cast a revelatory light on it.
Stranger than Paradise is really about the immigrant experience in America. In this way it is a strange, low-key response to The Godfather. Whereas Coppola saw the story of the immigrant as one of struggle, seduction, and eventual corruption -- a Hollywood tragedy, in other words -- Jarmusch argues that it is a grind, an endless procession of ungrateful relatives, incomprehensible television, dead-end jobs, and the slow realization that no matter where you go, the banality of real life is always there ahead of you.
Jarmusch was a pioneer in independent American cinema. The style of Stranger than Paradise is echoed in any of the countless "mumblecore" films that deal with the mundanity of contemporary existence (and perhaps existence in general). It is frequently a boring film, mainly because it is about boredom and its omnipresence. Certainly it could be aesthetically improved, so that the dialogue and the characters have the same artistic grace as the cinematography. But somehow I like Stranger than Paradise just as it is. Instead of the catharsis of Hollywood, it leaves the viewer with an emptiness, a strange hole in their gut that they can't quite figure out what to do with. But maybe that hole was always there, and the film only cast a revelatory light on it.