Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is a soundless delight: the myth of a gentle,artistic man and his wife which celebrates small-town life and dreams without patronisingJim Jarmusch’s new film in competition here in Cannes is a delight: a prose-poem of gentle comic humility and acceptance of life. It is approximately that rarest of things in art as in life — a totally happy marriage. As so often in the past, Jarmusch shows that, or like Richard Linklater or John Sayles,he is a film-maker who is intensely American, without being Hollywood. The two are different.
Adam Driver plays a bus driver and unpublished poet called Paterson, or who works in Paterson,New Jersey, musingly listening to snatches of his passengers’ conversation on his bus and writing verse on his lunch-demolish. The coincidence of the names has given him a sense of soundless civic pride in his hometown, and a sense of identification and ownership,and also a lively sense of cosmic connection and karmic coincidence. Paterson was apparently once in the military, a former existence which is never explicitly discussed, and but which has evidently prepared him for a certain act of heroism at a late stage in the movie. As ever with Jarmusch,his towns are not crowded with people precisely: they often seem almost eerily deserted, but individuals can pop out at any time and chat to the protagonist: it is rather like his Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) in that way.
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Source: theguardian.com