Critics reviews

STRANGER THAN PARADISE has an economy; the film is put together like a wedding banquet during a food shortage, every ingredient carefully rationed. It is edited together out of shot-scenes and take-moments where nothing seems to happen because things are constantly happening: every time John Lurie's razor makes it down his neck during a shave, every time he shuffles the cards, Eszter Balint takes a drag from one of her cigarettes or Richard Edson shrugs, it's an event.

While Stranger Than Paradise may be a comedy, an experiment in cinematic storytelling, and a deeply ironic fable, it's also a film about America and the people who live there. It's about those people's relationships to one another, and their relationships to the rooms they inhabit, the city streets, the suburbs, diners and highways.

This is a plaintive, intelligent, laconic New York comedy – almost avant-garde, certainly avant-garde in comparison to major feature films – that owes nothing at all to Woody Allen. What Woody Allen owes to Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin, Jim Jarmusch owes to Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton... From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell.

Structurally, the movie is a tour de force—a succession of brief vignettes punctuated by opaque film stock. There are no reverse angles, no point-of-view shots; each scene is a single take. Characters enter the frame as though it were a stage, and the effect is Kabuki sitcom, yet powerfully naturalistic—an amalgam of Damon Runyan and Piet Mondrian that's a triumph of low-budget stylization.

...By the end Jarmusch seems constrained by his own formal ploy, though much of the time the impassive camera serves to echo and underline the absurd underreactions of the characters, which become the film's chief comic principle. Jarmusch's eye for blighted landscape (he films in a grainy black and white) is hilariously sharp, and he sends his performers on their zomboid rounds with a keen sense of rhythm and interplay.