(Guest Review by Amitava Ghosh)
"Reality is Arbitrary".
Jim Jarmusch's latest movie builds on the melancholic loneliness that pervades his earlier cult movies like Down By Law and yet bathes in a Chesterton-esque aura of magical reality. The usual modes, methods and means, that a serious student of film-making traditionally possesses, are deliberately under-utilised here, allowing the creator in Jarmusch to attempt opening up communications at another plane. The outcome certainly challenges the established vocabularies of the cinematic medium.
"Universe has no center or edges."
The Lone Man (When, if ever, did one last watch a movie where the chief protagonist himself had no name?) is on a secret assignment. At each step of the 'puzzle' he would be asked in Spanish - "You don't know Spanish, right?" (Imagine being asked repeatedly whether you know a language in that language itself. How would you respond?) and given a matchbox that contains a chit of paper cryptically stating his next destination. The Lone Man dutifully chews up the chit every time, literally. The characters, that come to pass him information on how and where he can find his assassination target, talk to him about their views on music, cinema, sex and creation.
All the people, who act as messaging conduits, seem to have some esoteric views and if one cares to follow the conversations more minutely, the philosophies pouted by these momentary acquaintances leave a somewhat lasting impression. Do these very views echo in Jarmusch's subliminal self, or is he merely playing with the critics looking for deeper meanings, is something one would always wonder. Again, all these conversations are deliberately underplayed through heightened stylisation of the almost silent protagonist.
Isaac De Bankolé is passivity himself. A painting-loving, Tai-ichi practicing, smart professional with distrust for guns and distaste for gadgets, the character is misfit in most films of the mainstream suspense genre. But again Jim Jarmusch was never ‘Mainstream Hollywood’.
While reviewers have not missed Paz De La Huerta's cameo, entirely in the buff, Tilda Swinton, Youki Kudoh and John Hurt also do their bit of under-acting with a melodramatic glamour dolloped on them.
However, this is truly a Director's film. At the end of the assassination mission, when The Lone Man discards his bland suits in favour of a gay dress, the story ends suddenly with the sirens of authority swooping in on their potential target. Who says a movie has to have a definite and unambiguous ending? A creation that had started with quotations from Arthur Rimbaud's poetry ends with the rather loud slogan "No Limits No Control", losing a bit of the subtlety that has been this poetic narrative's main mode of communication all along. Is it because that Jarmusch himself is unsure whether the message has already been delivered by then?
