Sunday, April 1, 2007

Review of "Night On Earth"



An impressive low-budget film directed by Jim Jarmusch, "Night On Earth" is a 30 to 40 minute vignette on the lives of five different taxi drivers in five different cities around the world. Each of the five separate snapshots is supposed to take place at the same time, with the clock rewinding itself when transitioning from one story to the next...

In LA, a chain-smoking (Lucky Strikes) 18-20 yr old girl (Winona Ryder) drives a middle aged Hollywood exec. who is looking for looking for young undiscovered talent and sees it in the driver. She refuses, adding that she has her life all planned out to be a taxi driver, and more.

In New York, an East German immigrant and former circus clown tries to drive a New Yorker who complains about racial inequality e.g. that he usually can't get a taxi because most taxi drivers fear being robbed by a black guy (this is NYC in the early 90s). This story also highlights the cultural barriers between the East German and the black passenger from the suburbs of NY. If you observe, Helmut's driving skills improve at the end. Is this intentional?

In Paris, African diplomatic officials (Cameroon) insult African (Ivory Coast) immigrant driver. It shows that blind people have character as well e.g. can be sarcastic, rude, confident. The Rome story relates to humour, religion and parodising the Church while in Helsinki, the idea of sadness as being relative and the personal problems of the poor and retrenched are exposed.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

10 people attended last night's screening -pretty encouraging for a film postponed twice. For those who turned up it was well worth it -the 5 stories captured the 5 nationaly/culturally`different' cabbies well-with the 1st one perhaps less successfully -due perhaps to the European director ?

The Rome cabby wore a dark glasses in the darkness of 4.00am in the morning -symbolsing his self-inflicted poor vision which was confirmed by his confesion which he imposed on an old man he insisted to be a pastor-despite the repeated denial by the latter. He was so blind that he did not noticed the old man dying behind him -chattering to himself about his self-absorbed sexacapes ! What a surprise when he woke up to his passenger's condition...

The Helsinki episode was sad -and quite touching. 2 men faced their personal different tragedies differently -the one with the worse suffering (cabbie) managed to stay in control while the other (passenger)perhaps exaggerated one being totally out of control.

Since the episodes are from different nations those non-English speaking ones ie all other than the Los Angelis and New York one, are discernible thru English subtitles-which I suspect are a bit economic in language. The speakers are obviously yepping away after the subtitles run out. Are we missing something ????

Anonymous said...

Promote your film to the filmmaker community on www.mymovienetwork.com We are running film contests right now for cash and prizes and we have a place for filmmakers and film festivals to promote their work, events, have a profile and portfolio, use scouting features, write blogs, interact with others through private messages and much more.