Left Field Cinema

Mystery Train is a Memphis-based anthology-comedy caper about American foreigners’ and outsiders stuck in melancholy, facing the sins and situations ones feeling can lead too. With Elvis mystic, a cast including Joe Strummer & Screaming Jay Hawkins, writer, director and godfather of deadpan Jim Jarmusch plays with cinema-realism for comedic affect, writing for certain actors and non actors, compiling music before hand, tackling minimal themes kicking around since first man, Mystery Train is totally unique, on the opposite spectrum to Italian Neorealism, Jarmusch is a minimalist director who’s unpretentious, once a wannabe poet, he ‘wondered’ into film, bringing new found poetic realism to a filmography that has aged brilliantly, one of the uniquely great genre-benders like Stanley Kubrick, Pedro Almodovar and the Coen Brothers.

A rundown-downtown hotel links the stories together, Screaming Jay Hawkins & Spike Lee’s brother Cinque playing clerk and bellboy, there characters here and Elvis’ Blue Moon and a gunshot. Opening is Far from Yokohama a passive travel with a young Japanese couple, Jun and Mitusko who’s obsessed with Elvis; they lag around the hotel n Memphis. Story two, A Ghost, follows an Italian widow played by Nicoletta Braschi escorting her husband’s coffin back to Italy. She is also rather stuck in Memphis, in one of the hotel’s rooms she’s sharing with Dee-Dee played by Elizabeth Bracco, a talkative, sleepless twenty-something who got a mystery-visit from The King. Lost in Space is the angry-storyline, Dee-Dee’s husband played by Joe Strummer, her brother-poser Charlie played by Steve Buscemi and drunken buddy Will played by Rich Aviles talk shit at the local pub, only to take action and rob a liquor store. They cause further trouble the night they stay at the hotel, like most of Jarmusch’s films, Mystery Train involves deadpan humour, nonchalance, music, storytelling, drinking and travel, honestly told and acted.

Nicoletta Braschi, Cinque Lee and Joe Strummer are particular standouts, Buscemi hits the bat running with this character-shaping performance, his work with Jarmusch shaping his own ability to screenwriter, only lacking the cinematic-eye to really be at Jarmusch’s level with his own independent pictures. Masatoshi Nagase & Youki Kudoh play against Far East humour, they’re a great couple, comforting yet unattached at the same time, they emphasise the films layers of humour rather than theme, they bring out ones numbing enjoyment of a relationship as dissociate as the many in Down By Law & Stranger than Paradise. The three stories could be inspired by three of his favourite directors; Jean Vigo, Jean Pierre Melville and eternal-friend Nicholas Ray, lingering for a re-watch.

Mystery Train’s ending is left open in a good way, shying away from consequential-drama, it slightly lacks the feeling Night on Earth & Dead Man leave you, these two follow ups have even greater endings than the similar ones Jim presents in his first four features, we the audience discover Memphis with the characters, leaving much the same, with the ‘same indifference’. Jarmusch has shown certain streets of Memphis, New York, L.A, Rome, Paris, Helsinki etcetera as dystrophic areas, almost ghost towns, shot in colour Mystery Train has a couple of shots which show the CBD beauty as in Permanent Vacation, like a postcard by being fully in focus are the only things out of focus with the real, over-run-ness of Memphis and New York, two of his favourite towns that he shows in unique light, Mystery Train is one of the great films about the passive 1980’s made in the 80’s, one funny and well cast anthology films, one of the best you’ll ever discover.

Darcy S. McCallum