[Movie] Permanent Vacation
The local arthouse cinema is showing a Jim Jarmusch retrospective (link in German). I caught Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch's first movie, yesterday. On the technical side this clearly is a first effort from someone straight out of film school (in fact it was his master's thesis, I believe). The whole film is shot in 16mm and the sound is sometimes nearly unintelligible. The pacing is glacial, sometimes it takes minutes for the protagonist to just wake up and get going. This should become something of a signature device of Jarmusch's, his pacing picked up a bit in later movies but he still is famous for some of the slowest films in history.
Permanent Vacation tells the story of a few days in the life of Alyosious "Allie" Parker, a young man in Manhattan's lower east side, who loves to listen to Jazz and doesn't sleep much. Allie's life has no real point or direction, he just wanders around from place to place, meeting strange people in the process. He repeatedly tells his girlfriend that he doesn't want to do what normal people do, that he doesn't want to stay, get a job and stuff like that.
Allie's wanderings take him to the ruins of the house he was born in (which was destroyed in "the war, by the Chinese" - a plot point that went completely over my head, I really can't remember any war the US and China were involved in that resulted in property damage in New York and I can't figure out if this was supposed to be allegorical for something), then he pays a visit to his mother who is institutionalized in an asylum. Further meetings include the "doppler effect" guy who tells the absolute worst joke in film history, a sax player and a mad Latin-American girl.
In the end, Allie steals a car, sells it for $ 800, leaves his girlfriend for good and gets on a boat to Paris, where he intends to continue his drifting. On the way out he meets his French counterpart who just arrived from Paris and hopes that New York is to be his "Babylon". When Allie finally leaves on a ship, he refers to himself as a "tourist on a permanent vacation".
The movie revolves around the alienation Allie feels in regards to his surroundings and his unwillingness to do something about it. There are some memorable scenes (the "doppler effect" guy, the latina, the wandering through the derelict buildings of the lower east side), but overall this is a really early effort and it shows. The background sound really starts to go on one's nerves, especially the strange music playing when no Jazz is on.
Permanent Vacation is clearly a conciously artsy movie, which explains the lack of plot and the abundance of weirdness somewhat. It has some merits as an early glimpse of Jarmusch's work which already has some of the interesting bits of his later movies, but taken on it's own it is quite flawed. Only watch this if you're rather patient with your movies. Nothing for instant gratification lovers.
Permanent Vacation tells the story of a few days in the life of Alyosious "Allie" Parker, a young man in Manhattan's lower east side, who loves to listen to Jazz and doesn't sleep much. Allie's life has no real point or direction, he just wanders around from place to place, meeting strange people in the process. He repeatedly tells his girlfriend that he doesn't want to do what normal people do, that he doesn't want to stay, get a job and stuff like that.
Allie's wanderings take him to the ruins of the house he was born in (which was destroyed in "the war, by the Chinese" - a plot point that went completely over my head, I really can't remember any war the US and China were involved in that resulted in property damage in New York and I can't figure out if this was supposed to be allegorical for something), then he pays a visit to his mother who is institutionalized in an asylum. Further meetings include the "doppler effect" guy who tells the absolute worst joke in film history, a sax player and a mad Latin-American girl.
In the end, Allie steals a car, sells it for $ 800, leaves his girlfriend for good and gets on a boat to Paris, where he intends to continue his drifting. On the way out he meets his French counterpart who just arrived from Paris and hopes that New York is to be his "Babylon". When Allie finally leaves on a ship, he refers to himself as a "tourist on a permanent vacation".
The movie revolves around the alienation Allie feels in regards to his surroundings and his unwillingness to do something about it. There are some memorable scenes (the "doppler effect" guy, the latina, the wandering through the derelict buildings of the lower east side), but overall this is a really early effort and it shows. The background sound really starts to go on one's nerves, especially the strange music playing when no Jazz is on.
Permanent Vacation is clearly a conciously artsy movie, which explains the lack of plot and the abundance of weirdness somewhat. It has some merits as an early glimpse of Jarmusch's work which already has some of the interesting bits of his later movies, but taken on it's own it is quite flawed. Only watch this if you're rather patient with your movies. Nothing for instant gratification lovers.
posted by montag at 4:30 PM
2 Comments:
Maybe notable Chinese participation in the Civil War draft riots; rather something intentionally thrown in to confuse viewers.
Nah, it was the house he said he was born in, so the destruction would have had to have been recent. Since the movie was set in 1980 and he wasn't older than 16, the Civil War is out of the picture by a few hundred years.
Since his girlfriend also asked "What war?" I guess Jarmusch maybe threw this in to show that the protagonist really doesn't live on the same planet as everybody else. Or he's just fucking with my mind.
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