Part of the BAMcinématek series New Orleans on Film
Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 2, 7pm
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
With Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni, Ellen Barkin
(1986) 107min, 35mm
Jim Jarmusch’s picaresque tale, about a disc-jockey (Waits), pimp (Lurie), and an Italian tourist (Benigni) who are thrown into the same Louisiana jail cell, cemented his reputation as one of the “most adventurous and arresting filmmakers” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times) to emerge in the 1980s. The New Orleans setting remains abstract, but Jarmusch wrote that he “intend[ed] the film to evoke without directly employing the smoldering Louisiana sun, run-down hotels and bordellos, the Zydeco blues of Clifton Chenier, etc., landscapes punctuated by the sad shapes of cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss, chain gangs, swampland, Cajun French, the wrought-iron balconies of New Orleans, etc.”
