Reviews

The Swedish guy saw below the surface of Jarmusch' 'Down by Law'. To his mind Jarmusch has much more to tell than just making a 'great prison comedy' which is obvious in many of his other films too.

The three main characters of this film are representing true psychological types of our time. They are not just funny, even if Jarmusch likes to call his very serious films 'comedies'. So did Aristophanes about his plays, and funny they are, both Jarmusch and Aristophanes, but that does not strip their message from being quite profound.

Anyhow, some prefer the surface, some the depths.

This old film, black and white, stands out as a serious attempt to find out what was true about human beings in the 1840's, as well as in the 1940's. The common lot to all of us is depicted as the "Boulevard of Criminals". That is how we all begin.

Just to survive, we all become criminals. Judges are officially representing the "people", or the mob, looking for nothing else than their own crimes, failures, imaginary successes, or else they claim their money back. In reality the mob rules, but it is not quite insensitive of the "love" that emerges among the actors, or even between actors and public.

Love, on the other side, seems impossible. The one who loves someone is not loved by him or her, and all feel unhappy not to be able to return the love he or she is obviously feeling for that person.

I don't care a bit for the aesthetics of this film, pretty good as it probably is. What I care about is its genuineness about the human dilemma. Looked at from that viewpoint it is a great movie.

This film which is, as far as I know, the first one by Jarmusch, when he still studied to become a film director, is original in its way to reinstall 'realism' – somebody would say 'surrealism' – into film art. He tries to make us understand a special psychological type of our time, a 'tourist in life' on 'permanent vacation'. People having decided to follow that life strategy don't engage themselves in anything or anyone. They just do what they 'feel like', not caring about what that means to others. Others are not really human. They are looked upon as a tourist might look upon an exotic and alien tribe.

However, they themselves also feel alienated and estranged, indeed. Why engage in anything? The home where I was born was bombed out 'by the Chinese', my mother is crazy, my father is dead, and there is no hope for the future.

Jarmusch is convincing in his description of this psychological type which might be typical of our time. It might be a descripton of himself. But that is not what makes the film original. It is rather the way he succeeds in making that description.

Already in this film he uses stationary cameras with horizontal, and sometimes vertical, views, and depicts the world, as exemplified by New York City, as ugly as it is to all of us, if we do not embellish it.

What Jarmusch has to tell might be banal to some but it is certainly something that exists and is quite difficult to make understandable to us. Exactly like the opinion of the main character. But I think he has been successful in mediating such an understanding to us who have chosen a different life strategy.

"Down by Law" is a very realistic film, in the way we here in Sweden used to look upon Strindberg as a realistic author at the turn of the century, and Vilgot Sjoman and Bo Widerberg as film makers during the sixtie's. He, like them, just tells "how it is", this time in the US, not in Sweden.

Simultaneously, he represents a rather new esthetics in film making. I think that Angelopoulos, probably preceding Jarmusch, is perhaps the only one with a similar approach.

This esthetics includes a fixed camera near to the ground, with pictures of a reality just as shabby as we all know it is, and with a narration of human despair and hope, love and hate, exactly as we all know these feelings are, especially when we remember how we felt when we were children.

But it is not just esthetics. It also represents a new way of viewing the world. It adumbrates a new ethics, without being moralistic.

Besides, the film is psychologically very convincing. Two of the main personalities, those first going to prison, are pregenital, narcissistic, and latently homosexual. They seem to represent most people in our time, leaving their heterosexual friend with his impossible option, as they see it. Later they are parting company, in spite of their genuine feeling of needing eachother, however much hate there is between them.

The poor Italian is left in the swamp with the crocodiles, but his choice is an oedipal one, i.e. one of love, a choice that looks almost impossible in our time.

This takes me back to Sweden. Some ten years ago Ingmar Bergman directed a performance of Hamlet in Stockholm. He ended that version of Shakespeare's play with an attack on all and everyone on the scene, by youth criminals in leather gear and with machine guns. They simply killed them, flice in their eyes, as Shakespearean passions did not seem intelligable to them, members of the new generation. However cruel Oedipal passions might be, they appear not interesting, not even intelligible, to youngsters of our time.

Could it be that some new artists, like Angelopoulos and Jarmusch, want us to find those lost feelings of what is important in life, a feeling only some of us will recover in our own childhood? The Italian lover possibly found it, but in a swamp with terrible dangers. The two others, the narcissists, felt much more confident, convinced to conquer all dangers ahead. Brave new world!