MUBI

A table at a restaurant is often the ground and witness of social interaction; a laboratory of emotional reactions that observes mutating facts, and awaits for them to become silence until the customers leave and become replaced by the clashing of countless other personalities that either fight to keep control of a conversation or to fire away the right words in order to find acceptance.

Jim Jarmusch’s Coffe and Cigarettes is a compilation of short films that takes its title rather seriously, using every piece of mise en scéne to emulate the colors of those addictive social conventions that excuse the words for not coming out during uncomfortable silences that the characters tend to break with often silly remarks.

Under the comical tone of the film lies a profound examination of what a brief meeting involves apart from some sips of coffee and a smoke or two. The humanity of the characters goes from unreal to somewhat painfully natural, but it always has the intention of saying something about family, loneliness, friendship, and Nikola Tesla.

Family is perhaps the most recurring leitmotiv and is explored by Jarmusch and his actors as well as non-acting celebrities in several unique shorts starting with the one in which the Lee siblings appear along with Steve Buscemi. This short is notable for its usage of the color of the twins’ coffee in order to state they are both intrinsically different a contrivance that is seen throughout several other stories and although they answer in unison to Buscemi’s questions, they differ in everything except when they criticize Elvis Presley for being a racist, an allusion to their brother’s, Spike, concern for such topics as depicted in Do the Right Thing. Though this seems to be one of the most unimpressive shorts it sets a bit of the tone for the rest of the film in terms of its allusive and self-conscious nature.

Other family-related shorts include Cate Blanchett’s demanding and fulfilling role as two cousins one of them being herself whose appearance, body language and vocabulary deceives the audience and forces it to contradict its own paradigms of beauty in order to understand who the evil cousin is.

Alfred Molina’s segment is fantastic, and though it is a story seen many times before, his chemistry with Steve Coogan and his enthusiasm for finding a lost relative is so credible that it’s painful to see him mocked for not being as famous as Coogan.

The Whites’ is maybe the weakest short related to family, since they star as a couple of siblings, one of which Jack shows the other one Meg the Tesla Coil he builds after fighting her reluctance to see it by e´plaining the brilliance of Nikola Tesla. Although allusions to the White Stripes are plenty, this segment seems rather weak in every other aspect, except for the comical one, which isn’t, by the way, too funny.

Strangers meeting for unknown reasons and achieving nothing but one of the most awkward times in their lives, clash into each other always taking a laugh from the audience like the silliness on making a toast with coffee cups, the most recurring and actually endemic image to the seemingly disconnected shorts in the film. The first story, filmed in 1986 shows Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meeting under the aforementioned circumstances and letting the audience know through their almost absurd-theater-like talk that this is essentially a film starred by coffee and cigarettes.

A very similar situation happens in Iggy Pop’s and Tom Waits’ encounter, which is by far the best in the film due to the nervousness in Iggy’s huge eyes, which reflect his concern for not screwing up. This might be Jim Jarmusch’s version of a tongue-tied encounter between Socrates and Plato, the master and the disciple, interacting in a scene in which the disciple finds himself embarrassed and surprised after any attempt of conversation escapes his mouth. Meanwhile, Tom Waits, or the master, continually manifests discomfort and intends to humiliate the just-met Iggy, possibly motivated by his exclusion off the café’s jukebox. This is simply the most awkward conversation caught on film between two pop music geniuses.

The weak short among the stranger run-ins but not too much is the one in which Renée French plays a beautiful girl sitting alone smoking, drinking coffee as nearly every other character in the film, and reading a gun catalogue while being harassed by an anxious waiter whose intentions are never clearly expressed. Does he want to do his job right or does he want to seduce the woman? The answer for this question is left rather unclear, but what is quite clear is the fact that this is an ode to the striking beauty of this femme fatale.

Loneliness is the theme that seems to be interspersed throughout the whole film, since most of the characters seem alone even if they have accompaniment; most of the stories start with one waiting for another and ends with one left alone at the table. Yet there are two shorts that deal specifically with loners approaching other groups: the ones starred by Steve Buscemi and the Lee siblings and the one with Bill Murray and GZA and RZA.

Murray stars as himself meeting the members of Wu-Tang Clan while working as a waiter in a funny story that has the feel of being a synthesis of some of the film’s recurring topics, like having coffee in order to dream faster something mentioned before by Steven Wright, or the dangers of coffee and cigarettes, like in the short starred by Joe Rigano and Vinny Vella.

Friendship is dealt with in three shorts, where it is expressed as the concern an Italian-American Rigano feels for his friend Vella when he sees him smoking, or as the perception that something is wrong in the other’s life, as is the case of the Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankolé starred short, but the most poignant one counts with the appearance of Bill Rice and Taylor Mead, a couple of old timers, one of which seems to be an embittered party spoiler while the other one is a dreamer who wants to think that they’re drinking champagne and not coffee. In this last segment, Nikola Tesla reappears in the conversation and Gustav Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, a song inspired by poet Friedrich Rückert, shows up in a very poetic manner, highlighting the fact that Mead is someone who has lived his own fantasy no matter what anyone else says.

In the end, this is a film that has its weak spots, but the structure is so disconnected and yet brought together by the commonplaces, imagery and themes, that the stories are individual recounts of the very same occurrence that takes places with certain variations in different places among different people. A cup of coffee and a few cigs never seemed as meaningful and revealing of humanity: silly and deep, connected and disjointed, loving and cold; everything makes us understand that we are all the same and yet so different, and that we bump into each other roughly but intending no harm, like the clashing of two coffee cups.