Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES DIRECTED BY JIM JARMUSCH

THE ENSEMBLE of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, which has its New York premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, includes a young man named Jack (Jack White) who builds his own Tesla coil—one of those Frankenstein machines that makes electrical displays—then hauls it to a bar to show his sister, Meg (Meg White). Jack tells Meg the Tesla coil is "a conductor of acoustical resonance." That lovely phrase does dramatic double-duty: It's a description of Jack's machine, and also a sneaky self-diagnosis of Jarmusch's style. Few American directors are as interested in the electricity of silence.

An amazingly assured artist, Jarmusch ambled into American cinema with 1983's Stranger than Paradise, which showcased a style that was fully formed and unquestionably his own. His films—the best of which include Paradise, Mystery Train and Dead Man—fuse opposing qualities to create a distinctive vision; they're at once droll and earnest, anxious and relaxed, equally interested in talk and its opposite. Jarmusch's esthetic daring becomes clear when you consider the so-called "culture" that Paradise defied. In the mid-80s, Hollywood films were increasingly influenced by the frantic gloss of MTV and Madison Avenue (a trend that only worsened with time). In such a degraded environment, Paradise seemed (and still seems) perversely anticommercial, a black-and-white ellipse about a young Hungarian immigrant, her cousin and his friend that played like an Abbott and Costello movie written by Harold Pinter. Jarmusch wrung laughs with static wide shots of his sweet, clueless characters sitting apart from each other in scuzzy motel rooms and not speaking. The 1989 triptych Mystery Train conjured bemusement and unease with super-slow, wide-angle tracking shots of alienated characters walking the streets of Memphis. Similarly deliberate, atmospheric tracking shots recur in the black-and-white revisionist western Dead Man—notably in an early sequence where Johnny Depp's greenhorn hero walks the streets of a frontier town observing Fellini-esque sights, including a woman nonchalantly blowing a man in an alley.

Not all of Jarmusch's films are as purposeful. The hiphop samurai fable Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was original but tiresome, a trippy indulgence that seemed to have been edited by Cheech and Chong, and Jarmusch's cabdriver anthology Night on Earth was three-fifths a misfire. But even less-than-great Jarmusch is still fascinating—a proposition proved by Coffee and Cigarettes, a winning trifle that's the closest Jarmusch has ever come to a command performance. It's Jarmusch's Get Back—a deliberate, perhaps foolhardy attempt to recapture his artistic innocence (such as it was) and please fair-weather fans.

Coffee and Cigarettes is a collection of conversations built around the title substances, staged entirely in coffee shops, restaurants and bars, and shot, Paradise-style, in grainy black-and-white with a mostly static camera. (Jarmusch used four cinematographers, Ellen Kuras, Tom DiCillo, Robby Muller and Frederick Elmes, all wizards of monochrome.) The cast features many Jarmusch regulars, including Tom Waits, Isaach De Bankole, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Cinqué Lee, Alfred Molina and Wu-Tang Clan's GZA and RZA, who did the soundtrack for Ghost Dog. There are also several performers who are Jarmusch newbies but fit in so well you'd think they'd spent the last 20 years working for Jarmusch alone. Their ranks include the Whites, E.J. Rodriguez, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett and veteran New York character actors Taylor Mead and Bill Rice. No actor is given primacy—a democratic tendency that recurs in most Jarmusch films—and nearly all play "characters" with the same first name as the actors. (In the penultimate segment, a discussion of coffee-induced delirium and nicotine's value as an insectiside, RZA and GZA repeatedly refer to Murray as Bill Murray, as if he were a cartoon brand name on a par with Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse—and perhaps he is.)

Jarmusch-y moments abound. In the pregnant-pause-filled "Renee," a gorgeous young woman (Renee French) sits alone in a bistro, reading an article about motorcycles while a smitten waiter (Rodriguez) obsessively offers refills and bugs her to eat right. In "Those Things'll Kill Ya," one older man (Joe Rigano) hassles another (Vinny Vella) about his smoking and is needled in turn about his own prodigious coffee consumption. The latter's son borrows four bucks in lunch money from his stingy dad and earns the old man's disgust by returning with a four-dollar bag of Japanese Peas. In "Cousins," Blanchett plays both her blonde self and her non-famous brunette cousin, a celebrity-wannabe who makes Cate feel bad for giving her a free goodie bag as a gift and prattles on about a musician boyfriend who's in an industrial band called Sqürl. In "No Problem," De Bankole goes to a coffee shop to meet his old buddy Alex (Alex Descas) for what should be a pleasant, long-delayed reunion; it turns tense and faintly unsatisfying because Isaac keeps bugging Alex to tell him what's wrong even though Alex keeps insisting everything is fine. "Somewhere in California" features a conversation between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits about how great it is to have given up smoking. Of course they light up in no time—and Iggy plants a seed of insecurity in Tom's head by asking why he would frequent a joint that doesn't have his music on the jukebox.

Motifs abound: the idea that coffee and cigarettes are destructive but irresistible, and perfect in tandem; the notion that successful people consciously or unconsciously lord over those they perceive as less successful; the sight of relatives or twins competing even as they express mutual affection. One segment features Cinqué and Joie Lee as twins who dress almost identically and discuss Elvis Presley's dead twin with Buscemi's chatterbox waiter. Another finds a nervous Molina surprising actor Steve Coogan with the revelation that they're cousins.

But while Jarmusch's playfulness and consistency are admirable, this material sounds thin because it is. Coffee and Cigarettes has an echo- chamber feel, like a Charles Bukowski anthology that's fine in bits but grows repetitious. The photography is beautifully unfussy, each segment ends when it should and nearly every performance is engaging. (Some are even surprising: As her own fictional cousin, Blanchett is funkier and warmer than she's ever been, and Murray and the Wu-Tang guys are so relaxed and goofy together that somebody should write them a feature.) Yet the whole still suggests the movie equivalent of a musician aimlessly jamming with his bandmates, reworking cherished melodies and chords until the next great album presents itself.

Jarmusch fans won't care, though. They know the man's style is stubbornly personal. Even when he goofs around, he does it with integrity. He has a singer-songwriter mentality that produces work as idiosyncratic as music by some of his collaborators: Wu-Tang, Waits, Pop, Neil Young. Jarmusch and his bandmates dash off playful riffs that linger in the imagination—lines like Blanchett's, "When you can't afford something, it's really expensive, and when you can afford it, it's free," and Mead's confession, "I feel divorced from the world." For Jarmusch's characters, self-awareness is a blessing and a curse. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

VALENTIN Miramax has earned a reputation for button-pushing indie hipster movies. But the company's dominant position in North American art houses was built equally by winsome foreign language films about self-aware young boys—a subgenre cemented by early Miramax hits My Life as a Dog and Cinema Paradiso. That tradition continues in Alejandro Agresti's Valentin, a film that's no less wonderful for being familiar. Rodrigo Noya stars as the title character and narrator, an eight-year-old growing up in Buenos Aires during the late 60s. Valentin lives with his widowed grandmother (the great Spanish actress Carmen Maura, an Almodovar veteran), loves and distrusts his selfish playboy father (nicely played by the director) and dreams of his mother, who flew the coop years ago and is only an abstract presence in his life. He dreams of being an astronaut (a sweet sequence finds Valentin lumbering around his apartment in a makeshift moon-man outfit, half-dancing to Spanish-language pop) but spends more time obsessing over a way to find his dad a new mommy and build a stable home-life for himself.

Agresti gives you all the complications you expect and then some. The film's awareness of political tension, discrimination, sexism and the perils of aging marks it not as a kid flick, but a film about childhood aimed at adults. (Maura's movingly honest character treats the young hero like a pint-sized surrogate mate. "I'm glad you keep me company," she tells Valentin, "but I miss your grandpa very much. He loved me like no one else.") Agresti shoots much of the movie in medium shots, almost always from hip height, an old filmmaking strategy perfected in Spielberg's E.T. Valentin's smart narration is saved from preciousness by the actor's deadpan delivery and the filmmaker's matter-of-fact wording. "Grownups seemed incapable of telling the truth," he tells us. No kidding.