As in the song, the characters in this debut work by Jim Jarmusch are also looking for the blue sky behind the rainbow. But the song, played here by John Lurie and Earl Bostic, is so strange and depressing, so avant-garde, in the words of the cinema veteran, that instead of a blue sky it promises storms and an enormous existential void.
Characteristic of these first Jarmusch films (the scenario is repeated in the second, on the roads of the New World) is the emptiness that fills the streets of New York, Cleveland or Miami. But it is not a void unique to the New World. It is a global existential vacuum, which brings people from Budapest and Paris, in search of New York's Babylon, and brings back depressed New Yorkers, in search of other Babylons. Or if you prefer, of bluer skies, as in the song.
A promising debut by what would become the most important American independent filmmaker in the following decades. With a precise idea and a refined plastic sense in his films.
Characteristic of these first Jarmusch films (the scenario is repeated in the second, on the roads of the New World) is the emptiness that fills the streets of New York, Cleveland or Miami. But it is not a void unique to the New World. It is a global existential vacuum, which brings people from Budapest and Paris, in search of New York's Babylon, and brings back depressed New Yorkers, in search of other Babylons. Or if you prefer, of bluer skies, as in the song.
A promising debut by what would become the most important American independent filmmaker in the following decades. With a precise idea and a refined plastic sense in his films.