Julie would frequently remark, “Where’s that? I wanna go there!” Since then, as we’ve visited more waterfalls, we’ve also paid more attention to them when they’d happen to show up both in the movies and even on television shows.Īs a matter of fact, Julie and I started to engage in a little game where we would try to identify such waterfalls in real-time or on a search after the fact. As you can guess, the Lord of the Rings movies certainly helped to reinforce our waterfalling obsession as they featured quite a few. Farahani’s performance, of great charm and exuberance, conceals a fundamental repression and it might be that this repression is itself the necessary condition of all such utopias.Ever since Julie and I honeymooned in New Zealand back in 2004, we’ve been keenly aware that waterfalls show up frequently in the movies and on television. Paterson’s artistic pretensions, even if disavowed, are treated with more seriousness than hers, which are made to appear kooky. Their domestic routine is resolutely 20th-century, with Laura deprived of company and confined to the home during the day, decorating and baking and taking up hobbies, and during the evening too. Laura and Paterson are just adorable together, when they are together, but nothing more. Paterson’s earnest refusal to use a mobile phone reveals an otherwise unlikely kinship with Adam Driver’s character from Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young (2014), a send-up of the hipster technophobia indulged in by Only Lovers Left Alive. Paterson, Jarmusch’s best film since Ghost Dog (1999), might be seen as an attempt to start over, but there is no escaping the fact that Paterson the unsung poet is the invention of a much sung filmmaker, or that Paterson is post-industrial America as seen from the Lower East Side. Culture is ordinary, as Raymond Williams put it.īut, well, is it? Jarmusch’s last film, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), seemed to bring down the curtain on a cultural tradition whose exhaustion was manifest in the film itself, with its fetishisation of old guitars and vinyl, and its affected aesthetic snobbery was equally palpable. Whether or not Paterson’s poetry is worthy of publication, and whether or not Laura, in Nashville mode, will be one of “the greats”, as she puts it, isn’t the point poetry (broadly understood) isn’t about worldly success, and dreams don’t need to come true to be worth having.

Moreover, the life of the city, seen through the windscreen, and its inhabitants, heard from the driver’s seat, are invested with poetry, cast into a form one could call poetic and the film is filled with visual patterns, especially in Laura’s domain, the home. Doc curates a Paterson hall of fame behind the bar. On his travels he encounters a rapper (played by Method Man) in a launderette and a young girl poet who shares his liking for Emily Dickinson. Paterson includes a cameo from Nagase Masatoshi, who played the Carl Perkins fan from Yokohama in Mystery Train (1989), this time on a pilgrimage to the waterfall that Williams used as a leitmotif, and where Paterson eats his lunch.Ĭrucially, however, Paterson is not the only poet or reader in Paterson. In earlier Jarmusch films, poetry was the preserve of outsiders – Roberto Benigni, the fan of Whitman and Frost in Down by Law (1986), and Nobody ( Gary Farmer), the Native American Blake aficionado in Dead Man (1995) – while the white Americans remained ignorant.

The city’s rich literary heritage, above all the work of modernist poet William Carlos Williams and his long-gestated Paterson, is paraded throughout. Fragments of the city’s past pepper the film, touching on the whole history of the republic. Sharing Doc’s pride in a place that most people outside the US have never heard of, Paterson’s small scale is deceptive. But the film can’t help but generate suspense – will something happen, and will Paterson publish his poems? The bus journeys are given time to breathe, and the most dramatic subplot, concerning two fellow regulars at the bar, happily fizzles out. The action, such as it is, unfolds in uncluttered images at an unhurried pace over seven days in Paterson’s life, each a variation on the last. Indeed, Paterson’s minimal narrative and attractively downbeat setting hark back to the Jarmusch of the 80s and 90s.

Movie scene paterson waterfall