Jim Jarmusch has a great idea. He takes five cities, one nigh, one planet, and one occupation--cab driver--to make a movie that would really be ideally suited to the stage. Collectively, it is a reflection on the cultural petri dish the world is incubating across the planet (though he focuses his attention on Europe and the US, the same kind of stories could be told in Asia and Africa).
The first image in the movie is important: we the viewer start at universal darkness in the center of which is a rotating sphere of brilliant blue overlaid by wisps of white. As the camera closes in, the wisps turn into cloud formations. Familiar oceans and seas appear, then land masses that are as yet undivided by and unclaimed.
Though the movie is composed of five different stories, rooted in turn in the realities of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, "Night on Earth" seems always to keep the alien's distance, as if part of its mind remained forever fixed in outer space.
That is the consistent, comic method of Mr. Jarmusch's films. Though "Night on Earth" is exceptionally funny, it is no less bleak than those earlier movies. The often bright colors in which it has been photographed, and the laughter it prompts, are cloud cover for the darker side of what the film hints at but doesn't depict. There is a subtext in this movie that is up front enough that non-film students such as myself can enjoy it.
In "Night on Earth" Mr. Jarmusch explores a primal urban relationship, that of man and taxi driver, in situations in which woman is sometimes man and sometimes driver. The cab itself is the world temporarily shared. It's also a distinctive cocoon (each taxi in the film has its own special purr or knock) from which one of the parties will emerge if not changed, then at least shaken up, or, in one case, no more sure where he is than when he got into the cab. Superb!
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