It sounds like an exercise from acting class. An actor sits at a table on which the primary props are cups of coffee, an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes. A second actor is ready to join the first. They are given relatively little to work with – maybe some shreds of dialog, perhaps a bit of back story. Then they’re told to go to work and the camera starts rolling.

 

That, in essence, is the sum of a six-minute motion picture short that Jim Jarmusch filmed originally for Saturday Night Live & released in 1986 called Coffee and Cigarettes, featuring the then-unknown Roberto Benigni & SNL’s Steven Wright*. Jarmusch, who had had a “breakthrough” hit as a director of independent films with Stranger Than Paradise in 1983 – a film you may remember for its numerous performances of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ Put a Spell on You. Benigni was in the U.S. to portray the Italian tourist in Jarmusch’s next feature-length project, Down By Law, which also featured Paradise lead actor & saxman John Lurie (at the time a neighbor of Hannah Weiner on what was reputedly “the worst block on the Lower East Side”) & the great American songster Tom Waits.

 

When it was released, the six-minute film listed Jarmusch, Benigni & Wright as co-authors, meaning that it was largely improvised. And it looks it. There is virtually no action possible in this setting: Benigni and Wright trade chairs, then trade back; Benigni offers to go the dentist “for” Wright, so Wright gives him the appointment card. At one point, the camera examines the coffee table from directly above, rendering it almost a pop version of cubism.

 

While this may have been little more than some inspired fooling around at the edges of a larger, more comprehensive film project, Jarmusch had the idea of replicating the process, eleven versions of which were released this past year under the same title, Coffee and Cigarettes. For reasons that are completely opaque, this plotless, formalist black-and-white film was playing this past weekend at a cineplex in Edgemont, PA, which is rather like having Basquiat do a show in Nyack, or Dodie Bellamy read in Hillsborough. It’s a theater given more to Harry Potter type films & if I report that a quarter of the audience baled on the show my wife & I attended, I mean that two of the eight people in attendance took a hike.

 

C&C is a project not unlike watching the same short film done eleven times with different actors, in different settings & with different specifics & dialog. It is not, however, like watching eleven filmmakers realize the same project, however, given how visible Jarmusch’s trademark directorial style is in almost every one of these pieces. Jarmusch is a bricoleur of the underbelly of American culture, close kin in spirit to photographers like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark & even, in spots, Cindy Sherman. If he were a writer, Jarmusch fall somewhere between Kathy Acker & John Rechy, tho of all the people in these little comparative lists, only Sherman really shares the sweetness of Jarmusch’s sense of humor.

 

Nine of the eleven versions are filmed in diners or cafes that range between low-end to off-the-charts (Bill Rice & Taylor Mead, the only characters to identify their setting, do so as “The Armory”). More than once, the cigarettes in question are roll-your-own. In every setting, at least one shot gives a top-down view of the table, its elements reduced to an abstraction almost as simple as these tales. One of the questions, inevitably, becomes how to identify a diner or café in a film. Is it the presence of a jukebox in the background, as it is for Meg & Jack White? Several of these settings may well have been simply a dusty corner in a warehouse that had been converted into a sound studio for whatever production Jarmusch was working on at the time. Only two – one involving Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, the other with Bill Murray and GZA & RZA of the Wu Tang Clan – appear architecturally to really have been shot in diners.

 

Jarmusch adds to the formalist quality of this remarkably anti-narrative anthology of shtick by building in elements that resonate from section to section. Tom Waits tells Iggy Pop that he’s had to perform roadside surgery after coming upon a four-car accident that has made him late to his encounter. GZA & RZA likewise combine music & medicine, dispensing some very unreliable advice to Bill Murray. Alfred Molina tells Steve Coogan that genealogical research has revealed that they’re distant cousins; Cate Blanchett plays both a prim, even prissy, version of herself as well as a resentful just-this-side-of-lumpen cousin; GZA & RZA actually are cousins, although I don’t believe they mention that detail. Coogan is totally standoffish to Molina until he thinks that the latter actor is taking a phone call from director Spike Lee. Lee’s real brother Cinqué and sister Joie play twins in other version (Joie is actually five years older) & Cinqué shows up again as kitchen help in “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” in which White Stripes members Jack & Meg White initiate another thread concerning Nikola Tesla & his theory of the earth as a conductor of acoustic resonance (a precursor perhaps of string theory). The Tesla theme finds its resolution, or at least final reiteration, in the last segment, when it is recounted again by Bill Rice to poet Taylor Mead. Meg & Jack are a once-married couple who have on occasion “in real life” introduced themselves as brother & sister. It’s hard, here, to keep all these threads straight, particularly since not all are voiced explicitly & none leads, literally, anywhere. The thread is not a detail in a narrative here, but rather just what Jarmusch suggests, an acoustic resonance, to be heard & examined on its own terms. The film is immanent in the way that much of Robert Creeley’s poetry is – pay attention to what is in front of you here.

 

In a project of this sort, the actors & their ability to improvise and play off one another is exceptionally important. Waits & Pop do a great job bouncing off one another’s wariness, two pros who know each other more by reputation than as friends. Molina & Coogan do likewise, for similar reasons. Conversely, Reneé French’s vignette – she’s the lone person who is solo at a café, her interactions restricted to an intrusive waitperson – may be the most static performance on film since John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s Sleep. The gap between professional actors (Benigni, Molina, Coogan, Blanchett) and the non-pros – many of whom are musicians, tho none plays an instrument on camera** – is the largest & most obvious dynamic, tho the ability of RZA & GZA to hold their own against Bill Murray, who is in take-no-prisoners scene-stealing mode, produces the best single moment in the film.

 

Jarmusch has given us 11 ways of looking at a café table, a project that could not be further from the psychic roller-coaster rides of films like Hellboy & Spiderman. Indeed, the scenes themselves go nowhere, unless you take Benigni’s appropriated dental appointment for a major thematic resolution. But that’s in the first of the 11 bits. In the last, Bill Rice and Taylor Mead – himself a veteran of the old Warhol scene – envision themselves listening to inaudible (tho we hear it too) music, Mahler’s “I’ve Lost Track of the World.” That’s one point Jarmusch wants us to get.

 

 

 

* Steve Wright, for my money, will always be known as the author of the great line, “I was reading the dictionary the other day. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

 

** Iggy Pop’s Louie Louie, I should note, resonates from the soundtrack. It’s the song (and version) that you will waking up humming the next morning.