"You know, it's funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same."

Stranger Than Paradise, the 1984 indie cult classic directed by Jim Jarmusch, revolves around this key line.

The basic plot (what there is of it), is divided into three vignettes:
• Part One: Willie (John Lurie) is a Hungarian immigrant living alone in New York City. He is forced to take in a teenage cousin from Hungary (Eva, played by Eszter Balint) for 10 days before she moves in with an aunt in Cleveland. He is annoyed she is there and she is bored. We meet Willie’s sidekick, Eddie (Richard Edson). Eddie instantly has a puppy-dog crush on
Eva, while Willie grudgingly begins to warm up to her. The 10 days are up
and she goes to Cleveland.
• Part Two: One year later, Eddie and Willie win some cash through a fixed card game. They borrow a car and decide to travel to Cleveland to visit Eva.
They stay at the house with Eva and her Old World Aunt Lottie (who mainly speaks Hungarian). After spending a few days (including meeting Eva’s sad sack boyfriend of sorts), the duo decide to travel back to NYC. On the road, they make the impulsive decision to go to Florida instead and decide to turn around and see if Eva wants to go. She agrees.
• Part Three: The trio arrives in Florida. Willie and Eddie leave Eva in a hotel room while the duo go to a dog track and lose nearly all their money.
Through a deus ex machina, Eva gets hold of a bundle of cash and decides to go back to Hungary. After finding a note from Eva, the duo goes to the airport to try to talk her out of it. Finally, through miscommunication, the trio each end up scattered in different parts of the world.

That’s it. I’ve rehashed the plot here, because this film is never about its plot. Its focus is on tone, mood and the three main characters.

Willie is not, overall, very likeable, nor do I think he was meant to be. He has a constant sour expression on his face. When he first hears of Eva’s visit, he complains that he is “putting his life on hold” for her. We quickly learn that this life consists of long hours alone in a shoebox of an apartment, watching TV, eating TV dinners, smoking and staring at the walls.
His only means of income is apparently fixing card games and betting on horses. It is only when Eva is ready to leave that he realizes, too late, that he needs her company.

Eddie, apparently Willie’s only friend, might as well have “sidekick”
written on his forehead. Like a good sidekick, he is, in many ways, a reflection of Willie, only shorter. Both are rail thin and wear drab clothing seemingly out of the 40’s, complete with cheap fedoras. Eddie constantly wears a doltish grin and goes along with whatever Willy wants to do with little resistance-sadly, a good thing, since the one time they follow Eddie’s wishes, it turns into a disaster.

Eva is the only one of the three that senses there is more to life than this, but just doesn’t have the means. She is the only who seems to like listening to music (she plays Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on a cheap tape recorder). She does like Willy and Eddie and sees the Florida trip with them as an escape from the boring life she has with her aunt. When the duo makes the mistake of leaving her alone for long stretches in a dive motel in Florida, she realizes her life will be no better with them and has to escape.

Jarmusch’s distinctive style is at its pinnacle here. The entire film consists of a series of unbroken takes in which the camera rarely, if ever, moves. There are no close-ups. Each scene is separated by stretches of black. Various amounts of narrative time (from a few minutes to a year) pass in the blackness. Scenes will continue long after the last line of dialogue has been spoken (if any is spoken at all), as the camera lingers on the characters, leaving the audience to read their faces and wonder what they are thinking.

Tom DiCillo's spare black-and-white imagery finds beauty in the confined rooms and gloomy, industrial landscapes of the characters’ sparsely populated world. Two key scenes, however, show the characters almost in silhouette against a horizon that stretches out into eternity: one at Lake Erie in the dead of winter, another along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.
These two scenes highlight the core of the film: it is a treatise on the emptiness and ennui of three lives-think of an Antonioni film, but with three cash strapped deadbeats in place of Antonioni’s privileged Europeans.

Like the Coens, Jarmusch has a knack for making the setting of his narratives practically a character in his films. Location filming is absolutely essential to the story (see his Down by Law [New Orleans] and Night on Earth [LA, NYC, Paris and Helsinki] as further examples). The different settings in Stranger Than Paradise-and just as important, the similar settings-underscore what I find to be the theme of the film. In a rudderless life, everything eventually becomes the same, regardless of the background.

Note: I reviewed this through Netflix, so I only received Disc 1 of the extensive Criterion "Director Approved Special Edition." This disc features a digital transfer supervised by Jarmusch, as well as scene index. Nothing else.

However, Disc 2 is apparently loaded with extras, including the following:
• Jarmusch’s debut feature Permanent Vacation.
• A 40-minute documentary "Kino '84," produced in English for German TV in 1984, features clips of Stranger Than Paradise and interviews with cast and crew.
• "Some Days in January 1984," a 14-minute collection of silent super-8 footage shot by Tom Jarmusch during the production in Cleveland.
• A gallery of location scouting photos.
• American and Japanese trailers.
• A 45-page booklet that features "Some Notes on Stranger Than Paradise,"
written by Jim Jarmusch in 1984 for the film's pressbook, an essay by Geoff Andrew on Stranger Than Paradise, J. Hoberman's original review of Stranger Than Paradise, and Luc Sante on Permanent Vacation and New York in 1980.

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