The medium is the message in this slow but sure road piece. Little action and almost no dialog emphasize the seductive photography and make a film that keeps moving in spite of itself
Inspired by John Boorman’s action thriller “Point Blank” Jim Jarmusch’s latest follows a mysterious and threatening man through his daily rituals on the road to his fate. Isaach De Bankolé plays the Lone Man who is first shown in strangely absorbed exercise, alone in his room. He is subsequently framed in a series of rooms, always in variations of the same poster, laying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling, or into space, attempting to see into his own future. The opening scene is reminiscent of the “Apocalypse Now” opener in which Martin Sheen drunkenly and ritualistically conducts his martial arts exercises. Sheen said “I would get my mission and never want another” and the Lone Man gets his mission, too.
In the beginning he is neither a professional or an amateur in his endeavors but we gather from the cyber-punk philo-spy vocabulary that something under-handed is about to take place somewhere. In fact, something is about to happen everywhere. What the audience doesn’t know until the end is whether the Lone Man is really aware of the plot, or not. The viewer is constantly challenged to label him as either a progenitor or a puppet and De Bankolé does a great job of trying to figure that out himself.
The film is a road flick, travelling by land and air. Zillion award-winning lenser Christopher Doyle (“Ashes of Time Redux,” “2046,” “Rabbit Proof Fence”) is at the controls and anything goes, especially when re-teamed with Jarmusch. The cinematography is a thrill to watch. It is slow and seductive while being radical and creative. It is comforting while it is confusing. It sends the message that the viewer is being sucked into something and there is nothing to be done about it. Multiple shots through windows and mirrors challenge the mind to arrive at a solid conclusion as to where it is.
The shots out the train windows are the best. They look obviously processed, like the shots of the mystery thrillers of the 40s and 50s, but they are so obviously processed as to bring on a sense of off-balance wonder. Beneath the traveling and the confusing cinematography are a deliciously slow and foreboding sound track and a pervasive sense of cyber punk. There is something going on here but we don’t know what it is.
Following instructions to the letter, the Lone Man sits down to a series of coffees, each one set with two cups of espresso for the single man. Goya Award winning Óscar Jaenada is the confused waiter who eventually gets the message and John Hurt is the guest who carries the guitar to the assigned table. The guitar and the violin are alike in that each one carries a molecular memory of every note ever played on the instrument. Each table is set with the coffee and the instructions for each successive clandestine assignment are transferred in boxes of wooden matches. The boxes come and go, slightly different colors and ages but always with the same undecipherable letters and numbers carefully written on the paper inside.
The Lone Man reads the numbers, memorizes them instantly and swallows the paper with his coffee.
What follows is a set of vignettes in which a parade of celebrity actors trots across the screen in seemingly ever-weirder roles to fill out the cast of the mysterious villains and victims in the life of the Lone Man. Like him, they are searching for their purpose in the whole affair. Bill Murray is the last on the list, the final visit. The door is sound proof and the security is super tight but it doesn’t make any difference. The Lone Man is destined to be in the American’s office. Like the jungle in “Apocalypse,” even the security system wants the American dead. Like the papers in the boxes of matches and the cups of coffee, it has assumed a live of its own.
The medium is the message and this message is an ill wind. If language is control, as William S. Burroughs wrote in his essay “The Limits of Control,” than there is scant control in this film. Fuzzy logic rules the day. Moving solidly into cyber-punk territory, the characters seem completely under the control of external forces and the only forces we see are internal. All actions are without reason while operating with complete rationality. The "Lost in Translation" opening scenes are a perfect prelude to the mechanistic plot that unfolds and a funny nod to the "cones of silence" of the "Get Smart" series. The film refuses to be overtly funny and yet is the perfect satirical treatment of the finely oiled machine that is steadily drifting off the tracks.
Will people get it? The criticism will be Buddhist: 116 minutes and...then...nothing. Will everybody find it enjoyable to sit through 116 minutes of the gold standard of low key thrillers? A subtle comic treatment of the cyber-punk machine that moves with perfect precision and yet has no control---another victory for Jarmusch.
Directed and Written by: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Isaach De Bankolé
Release: May 1, 2009
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