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Night on Earth

Fri., September 15, 2006

As a handsome parting gift from our Roman holiday, I received in the mail today a package from my sister in Ireland, a DVD of perhaps my favorite Jim Jarmusch film, Night on Earth.

In Rome, we’d scoured a few record chains for the movie, which is strangely available most everywhere else in the world but the U.S. Unfortunately, the copies I located there were hardwired with Italian subtitles during the non-English segments, so I passed. The version my sister sent me she purchased in Ireland, so it’s in English and, in a happy coincidence, has no regional lockout, which means I can watch it without issue on my PowerBook.

Like much of Jarmusch’s work, Night on Earth is slow, surface-simple and reflective. It’s comprised of five independent mini-movies about taxi drivers and their fares in five world cities over the course of the same night. The dialogue of each segment is in the country’s native language and unfolds like a one-act play, volleys of conversation or monologue about life in general, salted with Jarmusch’s strange humor and occasional bursts of cursing. The story in each of the five cities is a life lesson that could be summarized something like this:

  1. Los Angeles segment: Know what you want and go after it. But keep in mind you may not get it.
  2. New York segment: ”There are eight million stories in New York City. This is one of them.“
  3. Paris segment: Sight may be the least reliable sense.
  4. Rome segment: For the love of all that is holy, do not get into a cab driven by Roberto Benigni1.
  5. Helsinki segment: Someone always has it worse than you.

All this, plus a soundtrack by Tom Waits. You cannot go wrong with Night on Earth. Here’s hoping Jarmusch will get the thing on DVD in the states officially to make an honest man of me (and to give me a bonus disc of extras, like he did with the bang-up Criterion Collection edition of Down By Law).

Maybe he’s embarrassed with the poor focus in many of the scenes of Night on Earth, which are obvious on the DVD transfer but which I hadn’t noticed on the crappy VHS copies of the movie I’d seen previously. I’d have to imagine this is a result of shooting most every scene in an actual moving car and not resorting to staged or effects-driven trickery. As Jarmusch stressed in a 1999 interview with Geoff Andrew of The Guardian, “Shooting in a car is really, really difficult and anyone who has made a film in a car interior will tell you, ’Don’t ever do that again.’”

1 Incidentally, Jarmusch directed Benigni in his break-out American film role, Down by Law, in which the hyperactive Italian had not only the best lines but one that sums up Jarmusch’s oeuvre: “It is a sad and beautiful world.” [back]

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