121212

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.