"Stranger than Paradise" is a stark and beautiful film. It could almost pass for Kerouac on film: the loneliness of America and the quiet desperation that is so brutally obvious and ever-present in its silence. And there are very few filmmakers who would have the daring or the insight to include long moments of silence such as "Stranger" has. Leave it to the existentialists to break a film-school taboo.
This is obviously not a film to show your college drinking buddies. That's a good thing, though. It's a film that meditates, for lack of a better term. And it demands that the viewers meditate, contemplate the grey, endless skies and the endless layer of white that makes most life dormant or sluggish during winter.
And when the characters arrived in Florida, it almost took me back to my childhood days when my family and I would arrive, by car, to some small town somewhere in America during summer; it brought to me that same sort of mild despair and disorientation that returning home from the family roadtrip always inspired.
And, I dont know, there's something then altogether tragic about Florida in winter anyway. There's an eternal longing in these characters and I think we can feel it even more because of the landscapes Jarmusch used in this film. A Florida motel in winter, with the sun beating down; and Cleveland, during the same winter, soulless and icy.
Beautiful, beautiful film and it's hard to stop commenting on the feelings it brings out. Shame though that Jarmusch hasnt really made a film that is as daring or expressive as "Stranger."
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