Stranger Than Paradise - 1984 - 4 Stars

Actors: Eszter Balint, John Lurie
Director: Jim Jarmusch

Note: Minor spoilers ahead

When I queue a movie, I try to find out as little about it as possible, even going so far as to avoid reading the little summary that Netflix provides. This way I have as close to zero expectations as possible. Stranger than Paradise opens with a terrible scene where we hear one side of a phone conversation; it's a classic film trope, where people don't talk at all how they actually do on the phone (i.e. they repeat the person's name every time they talk to them, repeat what they said back to them, etc.), but it provides exposition without the character just staring at the camera and telling us what's about to happen. With this scene, my expectations turned to less than zero, but the film turns out to be pretty damned good with some surprising twists along the way.

Stranger than Paradise has an 'I could have done that' feel to it; I have a dingy, spare apartment; I can hire actors; I can come up with not-very-interesting dialogue, and I can find a Morton Feldman imitator somewhere to score the film. What makes Stranger than Paradise a brilliant Cassavetes-style movie is all of things left unsaid and the way the characters' relationships change throughout the story. The film appears to be pieced together, but whether it is luck or excellent design, those pieces add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

One of the trade-offs to making a story like this is that the characters have to be pretty un self-aware and therefore appear almost buffoonish and/or bland, i.e. the 'protagonist' really doesn't know anyone or anywhere to visit besides Cleveland in the winter. Most characters in films are smarter than the average person, they're more 'in control', they can say really quick-witted things when they're being shot at, etc. - in these more independent ventures, the characters tend to have circumstances and Fate control them in ways they cannot grasp.