REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)
By:
April 22, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
STRANGER THAN PARADISE | JIM JARMUSCH | 1984
The first half hour of Stranger than Paradise is a self-contained work consisting of short, perfect blackout scenes in an apartment in an unnamed city, shot on leftover film stock that Wim Wenders donated to Jim Jarmusch after The State of Things wrapped. Jarmusch traveled the festival circuit with it for a year, raising money to expand it into a feature, and the result was a kind of Band à part in America: a nouvelle vague that is guileless and sweet, demotic and funny, in which Eszter Balint’s blunt Hungarian pronouncements (“I think this game [football] is kind of stupid”) are set against Richard Edson’s good-natured small talk. Cleveland, he assures her more than once, is a beautiful city.
I was eighteen or maybe nineteen in 1984 when my siblings and I went to see it at the brand-new Assembly Square Mall in Somerville. In the lobby afterward, we laughed over what could easily have been family in-jokes — in particular Aunt Lotte, the elderly Hungarian relative who, in this deadpan world, has the deadest of pans. “I vin again,” she declares without affect, an improbable card sharp. “I am lucky in card. I vin every time.” Lotte is someone we might have encountered on one of our father’s Eastern European bicycle trips, selling squares of toilet paper in a public lavatory. Or she might have been someone he remembered fondly from his Cleveland childhood. The belching refineries, wind-blasted Lake Erie covered in snow: poetic sight gags that seemed somehow specific to us.
Earlier, in the darkened theater, though, when the film opened on a shot of Balint as Eva — a suitcase in one hand and a paper shopping bag in the other, looking across a blighted field at planes taking off from the runway of some out-of-frame airport — I had experienced a jolt of recognition that approached the supernatural. That was me, that teenager shlepping her bags down a dark Hoboken alley, smoking, stopping to press play on a tape player. It was my first time hearing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, but I immediately understood “I Put a Spell on You” as the only song in the universe — its singularity echoing in the emptiness of the street, the spareness of the plot. I could fill pages with the specifics of my identification, which deepened with every line from Eva. You must simply take my word for it. And what’s more, I loved this movie for not breaching her walls. “I can take care of myself,” she tells her cousin on her way out of the apartment. “I’m going alone.” We don’t learn where she went; she’s just back in the next scene, sitting at the table, skeptically regarding Willy’s TV dinner. She doesn’t crack a smile till she gets to Cleveland.
REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Annie Nocenti on AFTER HOURS | Lynn Peril on BRAZIL | Mandy Keifetz on BODY DOUBLE | Carlo Rotella on ROBOCOP | Marc Weidenbaum on GROUNDHOG DAY | Erik Davis on REPO MAN | Mimi Lipson on STRANGER THAN PARADISE | Josh Glenn on HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING | Susan Roe on HOUSEKEEPING | Gordon Dahlquist on SOMETHING WILD | Heather Quinlan on EATING RAOUL | Anthony Miller on MIRACLE MILE | Karinne Keithley Syers on BETTER OFF DEAD | Adam McGovern on WALKER | Ramona Lyons on MILLER’S CROSSING | Vanessa Berry on WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | Elina Shatkin on NIGHT OF THE COMET | Susannah Breslin on MAN BITES DOG | Tom Nealon on DELICATESSEN | Lisa Jane Persky on RUMBLE FISH | Dean Haspiel on WEIRD SCIENCE | Heather Kapplow on HEATHERS | Micah Nathan on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | Nicholas Rombes on SLACKER | Mark Kingwell on WITHNAIL AND I.
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