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Coffee and Cigarettes review
:. Director: Jim Jarmusch
:. Starring: Bill Murray, Tom Waits
:. Running Time: 1:36
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: USA
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The origin of Coffee and Cigarettes stems from a1986 short featuring Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright. After this a few other shorts followed, including one in 1989 with Cinqué and Joice Lee (Spike Lee's siblings) and Steve Buscemi, and then another in 1993 with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits. Added to this are several other shorts to make up a feature film uniquely consisting of small sketches. In this type of exercise, rare are the honest successes i.e. where all the sketches, without exception, succeed. Coffee and Cigarettes will make us lie. And even if, obviously, everyone will have his or her own preference for a particular sketch (for me that would be bringing Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan together), one must acknowledge that the entire film is pure rapture.
The sketches form a production of discussions between people. There is no family tie between the sketches; the only common point of reference they have is to be located in bars where one drinks coffee and smokes some cigarettes for the occasion of the beautiful medium of discussion (and the film's title). Thus a minimalist device for Jim Jarmush. A table and some chairs (correlative to the number of people in the sketch). The direction is limited to some shots/reverse shots, some wide shots, punctuated from time to time by some takes from the top of the table. Jim Jarmush proves a strong asceticism as the entire film is in black and white. It is not a surprise when we know that his first feature film, Permanent Vacation, then Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law and Dead Man obeyed the same aesthetic choice. Phenomenon of recurrence? Not exactly. Rather, let's talk about nostalgia or that Jarmush would like to. Indeed, it is enough just to see the cast to understand. Those present include Roberto Benigni, who appeared in Down by Law and Night On Earth, Steve Buscemi in Dead Man and Mystery Train, Iggy Pop in Dead Man and E.J. Rodriguez in Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, etc. Let's stop here. There one sees the majority of the actors faithful to the American director. As present as always, the spectrum of music navigating from sketch to sketch, whether through the means of the actor-musicians (Tom Waits or RZA among many others) or by the music constantly heard in the background (probably played by a juke-box) during the discussions.
Should we believe that Coffee and Cigarettes is just a reediting of Jarmush's previous films? A narcissistic homage to an already quite accomplished career? A simple buddy film? Would the film be limited to just that? Not really. While there is a dimension that one has trouble perceiving in Jarmush's films, it may well be the absurd dimension that here finally takes increases in scale without ever being the cornerstone. The discussions seem taken right from a surrealist dialogue that people like André Breton and Antonin Artaud could have had.
Subjects are tackled any old way, like genealogy, the dentist, the earth as the conductor of acoustic resonance and Tesla's reel, or even nothing concrete in the sketch with Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas. The feelings of annoyance are increasingly heavy in the discussions, each one seeming to be guilty of being at the place he currently occupies. Thus this flood of words without real meaning, as if their presence or existence had to be justified, to give a meaning to a situation which doesn't have one.
One then thinks about Samuel Beckett's literature, the great writer who best knew how to describe the tragedy of man close to his own demise. As in Waiting for Godot (a play from 1952), Jim Jarmush seeks to render sensitive the uselessness of waiting for Revelation, of the meaning of an unspecified relation: the bodies and the voices, the desires and the images of some meet those of others only to better separate at once (the majority of the sketches are completed like this), everything with a certain sense of humor.
Thus belonging to an addition of interior monologues, Coffee and Cigarettes describes characters haunted by the idea of nothingness, trying to hold on to themselves at the edge of the abyss, of expressing the impossibility of living with the awareness of the ending of existence, as the last sketch illustrates with great poetry.
Julien Dufour
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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