4 Answers

  1. For me, Jim Jarmusch is generally a director with a special author's vision, who in many of his films, sometimes as if contrary to Hollywood trends, creates stories in which everyday life is sung. From those moments that are usually cut out at the production stage of large-budget, profit-oriented films, films consist: “Night on Earth”, “Coffee and Cigarettes”, “Mysterious Train” and “Paterson”, where this idea of” everyday life ” is raised to the absolute. Jarmusch, like some kind of supreme observer, moves to a random point on the planet Earth at a random time and begins to observe an ordinary person, as a rule, for how and what he lives every day (“Night on Earth”), or, like a random passerby, begins to observe the people who surround him, without interfering with the narrative and fixing the true reality (“Coffee and cigarettes”). And it would seem: everyday life is too boring, we encounter it every day and in real life. But Jarmusch somehow manages to show the life of ordinary people from an interesting side: meaningless conversations actually mean a lot and fill our lives, just as the little things that we try not to notice are actually extremely important and can tell a lot about a person. So “Coffee and Cigarettes” is a picture that will appeal only to a thoughtful and attentive viewer who is ready to notice small details and observe the characters. A special kind of cinematic pleasure that not everyone will enjoy.

  2. For me, this film has this meaning : dialogues that do not carry a deep or philosophical (unreal, unnatural) meaning and way of narration , extremely natural , which immediately relaxes and predisposes the viewer to a relaxed conversation , in the company of a cup of coffee and a smoked cigarette, which is called “like in life” , maybe that's why this film, like other works of a famous author, has long been with the status of a cult. Watch only high-quality movies 🤓

  3. “Coffee and cigarettes” is a poetic cycle based on the principle “when would you know from what trash”.

    Technically, Jarmusch is playing up what Robert McKee called the “California scene”in his million Dollar storybook. This is an example of the scriptwriter's poor work, when he doesn't know how else to reveal the character and exposition, except by pushing the main character with strangers in a cafe. The hero tells him everything that the viewer needs to know in order to understand the intrigue and development of the plot. Structurally, such a scene is necessary to develop the plot and reveal the character, but it's just a bad way to do it. It violates one of the main rules of writing: “Show, don't tell”.

    The catch is that in “Coffee and Cigarettes” there is nothing but this conversation, no plot development, nothing but this act of communication, mostly funny and a little uncomfortable. Jarmusch just cuts out everything else, leaving only the conversation. It may seem pointless, but it's actually more important than anything else.

    Coffee and cigarettes are an excuse, a material bundle, a condition for the conversation to take place. A young man offers to drink coffee to the girl he likes, and together they offer to go for a smoke break to someone with whom the person is not averse to talking. In Jarmusch's case, it's the only thing that connects the conversation between these people. Coffee and cigarettes, black and white, almost all the scenes of the film unfold at a table with a chess pattern and a game of chess is really played on it, only instead of pieces – phrases of heroes. But none of them will put the final checkmate to the other, because this whole party is our existence.

    In the later plays of Samuel Beckett, in which in fact there is only one actor, there is always a listener besides the speaker. The perceiver and the perceived, who fight to win the conversation, compete in who will absorb whom. In reality, both of them are a necessity for each other. Developing Beckett's point, Jarmusch, through the example of a bad scripted scene, argues that none of these characters even exist outside of this dialogue. Because the dialogue develops here-and-now and there is nothing else (and here, next to Beckett, another Jarmusch idol appears-Yasujiro Ozu, whose “Tokyo Story” is almost the same film in which nothing happens, because everything in it is the present, without illusions of the past and future). And in general, none of us exists outside of the conversation, outside of someone else's presence.

    The story has no development, the acquaintance has no consequences, because there is nothing outside of this conversation. No matter how funny or stupid the conversation is, it's all we have, it's all we can exist in at all. Even if it is held together by such unnecessary and harmful things as coffee and cigarettes.

  4. This is a movie that you have to watch twice.

    If you look closely at the scenes, people and props surrounding them, you will notice that each time coffee, its type, what and how it is drunk or not drunk (the same applies to cigarettes) gives a subtle characteristic to the characters and their situations. These are like additions to people's images, some of them explicit, ostentatious, and some of them very personal and intimate.

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