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Jim Jarmusch, says the publicity, "resists the notion that his films are necessarily becoming more conventional." In rhetoric this is called prolepsis--anticipating an argument with a prior response. Jarmusch's new film Night on Earth (Fine Line) explains why he may be uneasy. I can't comment on "necessarily" in the quotation above, but certainly Night on Earth departs from the heterodoxy of Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train. Those taciturn films seemed to hover around their people, rather than enclose them; they not only dealt with offbeat subjects, they implicitly mocked the way conventional filmmakers might have handled those subjects. Not so Night on Earth.
Its very form is a formula. We catch the glint of the cookie-cutter as we recall earlier uses of the pattern. In this case, it's five sequences with five taxi drivers in five cities around the United States and Europe. In If I Had a Million, 1932 (to name just one), there are several episodes in each of which someone is suddenly handed a million dollars.
Qualms are not calmed by Jarmusch's first shot, a globe rotating in space, followed by a close-up of a map that we move across to the first locale, Los Angeles. A small light goes on in the map when we get there. Additionally, we see a bank of five clocks showing the time in our five prospective settings. (This whole process is repeated between episodes.) We want to hope that Jarmusch is kidding with all this corn. But he isn't.
The five sequences--sketches, really--do add up to a technical challenge: how to shoot a lot of scenes inside taxis and yet avoid visual tedium. This...