Mystery Train (1989)

 

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Masatoshi Nagase as Jun, Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, Screamin' Jay Hawkins as the Night Clerk, Cinqué Lee as the Bellboy, Jodie Markell as Sun Studio Guide, Nicoletta Braschi as Luisa, Elizabeth Bracco as Dee Dee, Sy Richardson as the Newsvendor, Tom Noonan as the Man In Diner, Joe Strummer as Johnny "Elvis", Rick Aviles as Will Robinson, Steve Buscemi as Charlie, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Ed, Tom Waits as the Radio D.J.

Canon Fodder

 

His name is Dave.

An anthology produced with backing from JVC, the Japanese electronics company did work in multiple mediums such as video games to anime, so this is not an alien concept to them alongside their main form of business, including their legacy in televisions and videotape recorders. Thankfully, among their investments was also Jim Jarmusch's 1989 tribute to Memphis and its music, the beginning of his series of anthologies over these years such as Night on Earth (1991) to compiling the Coffee and Cigarettes films started in 1986 into one film from 2003.

Mystery Train really is not a film about a dramatic plot, instead three interconnecting mood pieces, with the first absolutely setting up this greater emphasis away from dramatic tension as there is none, only the adventures of a young man and woman from Yokohama in Japan. They do argue whether Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins was better, but are a loving couple. They are tourists out of their element, star struck by the home of their favourite music, without any cheap jokes at their expense; even the later presentations of this film through Criterion went further to fix issues in the past with the subtitles for their dialogue, mostly in Japanese, which prevented viewers from knowing everything they say. They say a lot, as loving music fans who wonder the real locations of Memphis, including a confused tour of Sun Records, with a language barrier, a leather jacket between them on her, and their large red luggage case being carried by the pair on a giant wooden pole. Both of the actors, Masatoshi Nagase as Jun and Youki Kudoh as Mitsuko, stand out with personality, both with prolific careers after this. There is also the added delight that, looking the part for a youthful rockabilly here or a Wong Kar-Wai protagonist, Masatoshi Nagase became grizzled as he got older and starred, in just one year, in Sion Sono's Suicide Club (2001), Gakuryū Ishii's Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), and Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera (2001), three of the most idiosyncratic Japanese filmmakers at their most idiosyncratic and interesting.

Their story is entirely about two people talking and bonding, some arguing and the cool trick of using a lighter with your feet being demonstrated. To be honest, Jarmusch's tone for many of his films, whether a good comparison for some or not, is closer to Quentin Tarantino's throughout his career, extensive conversation from characters about their obsessions, only with the emphasis on Jarmusch further from cinema to an entire spectrum of tangents, from Jack and Meg White of the White Stripes being obsessed over a Tesla Coil in Coffee and Cigarettes to Mystery Train having a tangent over one of the characters being named Will Robinson, after the Lost in Space television series, which he dismisses as dumb white people being stuck on an asteroid. Though Jarmusch has dabbled in more overt plots too - Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) - another factor to his career, unlike Tarantino, is a more warm and humane tone, where even when it comes to his horror film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), it is more about bonding over awesome old LPs and character dynamics with the horror coming unexpectedly, even as a punch line for sick humoured gags. The Limits of Control (2009), his drone metal scored assassin narrative, plays like a pastiche but not in an ironic way, and with Mystery Train, though a gun is set off at two points, it feels entirely like an empathetic ode to these characters obsessed with culture of all kinds.

Thankfully, Jarmusch has always been able to make likable characters, the first act's outsiders who go along without unnecessary contrivances against their expense. They also set up the central hub to all the scenes, as they are the first to enter the hotel everyone in the three stories reach, where you have Cinqué Lee, Spike Lee's brother, as the bellhop, and legendary proto-shock rock musician and singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, in an incredible red suit, as the hotel manager. When not eating a Japanese plum, these two are in the centre as a Greek chorus to all the other stories. This includes a grieving Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), travelling to Rome with her husband's casket, in a story where she is able to overcome this in spite of this. This involves Tom Noonan, being very creepy, talking about encountering the ghost of 1956 Elvis in the night, forced to flee him but encountering another woman lost also by herself to share a hotel room with. For the third story tension does come in, but with a comedic edge, involving Joe Strummer of The Clash, the legendary punk band. By this point, Strummer had disbanded the band in 1986 after the infamous Cut the Crap (1985) album, compelling to listen to as a strange mix of football chanting, layered audio and cheap synth beats, but understandably a misfire of big proportions even as someone who found songs likable on it. It was the ill-advised decision by Strummer to have key members of the band forced out the band, replace them and attempt to return to their roots without doing so at all. He would move onto solo projects and also start a film career, such as here or with Doctor Chance (1997) by F.J. Ossang, a French film maker whose films I wish was more readily available, where he has a small cameo talking about his gonads. Strummer is Johnny, or Elvis as everyone calls him due to a passing similarity, an English ex-pat who has lost his wife and job. Drunk, and with a loaded gun, his brother-in-law as portrayed by Steve Buscemi, continuing a career here of always getting the worst luck, having to be brought in with Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) to stop him doing mischief. "Elvis", due to one racist liquor seller later, does end up firing the gun and they find themselves hiding in the hotel as a trio, stuck talking in one of the rooms about the fact there should be a Malcolm X suite instead of Elvis photos everywhere.

Mystery Train is not a dramatic, plot driven film even by this point, and this is factoring in that the real ghost of Elvis Presley accidentally appears in a hotel room for a cameo. Mystery Train is about the characters in place, not forced to move for the sake of drama but allowed to breathe, Jarmusch liking to write extensive dialogue between them hanging out. His cinema is not as overt as Tarantino's in being post-modern or self-reflective either, instead name checking his favourite things but Jarmusch still emphasising the characters existing in the pretence of narrative structures. They are characters with suggested lives, unlike early Pulp Fiction era Tarantino where they were absolutely archetypes. Set around one specific time period, with Tom Waits as the radio announcer's voice heard through all this, Memphis itself and the cultural heritage is as much the subject, the title of the film itself a song heard in both versions by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. A warm film, it nonetheless does also tackle some serious topics in this mood; the two covers of Mystery Train in itself two also name checks the issue of Elvis being placed as a white musician seen as appropriating black musicians' work and being easier to sell to white audiences, which is a subject of discussion alongside tensions of race occasionally raised in the film. Elvis himself is not demonised, but for a fond film, which is charming and sweet, it still nods to complexities which Jim Jarmusch has shown throughout his career, as it is using these three stories to create a work about Memphis as a place with its rich history just in terms of music, let alone the actual urban landscape as shown throughout.

Mystery Train has always been a film I admired, in mind that it is a film literally about nothing if you take a simple view of it - no consequences, even of firing a gun into someone, or two, are shown at all with an open ending to the third story. Nonetheless it does feel like an experience, lived in, enjoyed, with a few one liners which are hilarious, and it wins me over repeatedly every time I return to this film.

The Limits of Control (2009)

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Isaach de Bankolé as Lone Man; Bill Murray as American; Tilda Swinton as Blonde; Gael García Bernal as Mexican; Hiam Abbass as Driver; Paz de la Huerta as Nude; Alex Descas as Creole; John Hurt as Guitar; Youki Kudoh as Molecules; Jean-François Stévenin as French; Óscar Jaenada as The Waiter; Luis Tosar as Violin

For today, we have what is regarded as Jim Jarmusch's less regarded film. Openly, on the offset, I have come to love The Limits of Control initially in mind that, in lieu to a career of mainly dialogue heavy films, and with his debut Permanent Vacations (1980) the weakest I have seen, the reputation of the film comes as much from how boldly he stepped out of his comfort zone rather than whether it was an artistic disaster or not. The tone is one you have to appreciate immediately or the film will not work. Tonally, the choice to score the film to drone metal is the perfect symbol of what Jarmusch's last 2000s film really is, a stretching of simple factors as furthest as possible in slow prolonged riffs which build. To watch The Limits of Control is the director-writer stretching his obsessions and a crime story to their extreme minimalism.

Here he has an assassin story, told with clear nods to the European film traditions of existential qualities, but also as an incredibly minimal series of vignettes building from his habit of acquiring very distinct casts just to have walk-on cameos. It is an experimental risk that would divide even his fans inherently. What the plot is turns out to be very simple and easy to grasp if plotted out - Jarmusch regular Isaach de Bankolé is sent out on a contract to kill an American politician, but the film itself is about the journey, following various different figures exchanging matchboxes to the next person, all of which end up on conversations about everything from movies to even the potential scientific uses of molecule research.

It's droll, esoteric and would be immediately accused of pretentious; here is a world of assassins where Tilda Swinton is a silver wig and cowboy hat can go into a conversation about The Lady of Shanghai (1947) not making sense. Where it all makes sense for me is that the hectic (possible) reality of hired killers is clearly not what we have as is usually depicted but something else. In complete honesty, the only aspect that feels absurd for me is that actress Paz de la Huerta spends most of the film entirely nude or in a transparent raincoat only, probably in the only moment of Jarmusch's career he ever seemingly, for better or worse, had a boner in his art. Aside from this, this is still a playful Jarmusch film, the slow pace not as extreme as even how drastically glacial Gus Van Sant's films became in the 2000s, to compare to another American indie auteur, but is instead leisured and zen like.

Even the dialogue is not that surprising when, in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), two vampires can talk of underground bands, his cinematography a catalogue of long and lengthy tangents that were always of a sign of Jarmusch being a proto-hipster. The difference between him and Quentin Tarantino was always his sense of a warmer humanity rather than an overt archness, and this applies to The Limits of Control as, for all its languid moments and tangents, the dialogue does has sparks of amusement or a willingness to raise an eyebrow at itself when characters start bringing up quotations.

Helping considerably is the cast, Bankolé a magnetic prescience who spend the film almost entirely mute, his rituals like ordering two cups of espresso at once given a light conviction to them without being heavy handed quirks. Beyond him, Jarmusch has since the start of his career always attached himself to idiosyncratic actors. de la Huerta, despite spending the film mostly nude, a blunt literalisation of a femme fatale that is played for clear humour¹; Tilda Swinton, who'd work with Jarmusch onwards from this film; John Hurt, in a nice cameo talking about the real bohemians; a returning Youki Kudoh, from Mystery Train (1989); and many more. At whatever point, likely Mystery Train as it was a three part anthology, Jarmusch became obsessed with even casting minor one scene roles with distinct faces, character actors, even non-actors like Screaming Jay Hawkins. Whether it succeeds or not each time, it does at least mean you care about the side characters, as he always cast good actors who can make dialogue like here credible or have figures that stand out.

Notably as well, in terms of casting, he had the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle on this production, and set in Madrid the result is sumptuous, contrary to its plot for a clear deliberateness. Large portions of the film are devoted to Bankolé's hit man waiting (from visiting an art gallery to sitting at cafes) which doe add to the entirely deliberated neutered tone that likely irritated many; I fell in love with this because, not only is it clearly going for a meditative state, but Doyle's work is gorgeous here, one of his less overtly colourful or heightened productions, but with a sense of style that is rich.

Of course, the score as mentioned is drone metal, a genre I am fond of, compiled of many legends of the sub-genre such as Earth, the pioneers of it, to the likes of Boris and Sunn O)). Drone metal, in which a single riff can be purposely slowed and extended out for minutes, has found itself in the curious place where it is appreciated by non-metal fans, once described as being "raga played in an earthquake"². It is one of the most extremely experimental genres because of it minimalistic, a genre that certainly adds atmosphere as it emphasises the slowness contemplative state of the world we see onscreen.

Tonally the film has a repetitious nature which adds to the material, haziness from the phrase used to indicate each person Bankolé has to meet, "Do you speak Spanish?", to the motif phrase of a proud man being recommended to visit a graveyard to realise where humanity is. The sense of ominousness, the motif of death, does grow on a rewatch, felt for me now similar to Dead Man (1995) which was scored to a noisy rock instrumental score from Neil Young. A sense for all the humour and clear delight is still to be had in the references to classical art, but the existential nature of the film does play off this sense of mortality. Likelihood is that Bankolé could easily represent the Angel of Death on interpretation. It doesn't detract from the pleasures to be had, as this is a film where a guitar string literalises the weaponisation of art, but it feels sombre as much indebted to its influences as it is Jarmusch's own work.

The result, in its lack of a lot of dialogue or a full plot, turns into being a shifting experience, one that is fully experienced instead of exposited. The result is, controversially, becoming one of my favourite of the director's films as it's a one-off, a work that I came to with lowered expectations and a decade plus wait, only to grow into this magnificently atmospheric and powerful piece.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Minimalist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

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1) Its fascinating to think, in how I remember this period, that Paz de la Huerta was almost being held up as being a new voice after her appearance in Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009), a name of interest in casting only for her to disappear in the early 2010s. Obviously the real tale in more than this, with roles before and a career of performances into the 2010s, but the casting here the same year always had a sense of weird synchronicity that never lead to anything else.

2) A reference to this article on the sub-gebre.