Coffee and Cigarettes

Coffee and Cigarettes (2004) is made of eleven short episodes. In each of them two or three people sit at a table, drink coffee, smoke and talk. Nothing happens. What the episodes share is deliberate too: black and white, a chequered tabletop, coffee and cigarettes. The strangest thing about it is how long it took. Jim Jarmusch shot the first episode in 1986 for Saturday Night Live. The second came in 1989 and the third in 1993. The rest were made across the years and only assembled in 2004. The project spans seventeen years. The consequence is visible. The performers age between episodes, the film stock changes, and the tones do not match. The cast is remarkable. Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Cate Blanchett as both herself and a fictional cousin, Bill Murray with RZA and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina, Meg and Jack White. The best known episode is Waits and Pop, who argue that having quit smoking they are now free to smoke, and hunt for each other's records on the jukebox. That episode won the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993. It runs 97 minutes. Good for: Jarmusch, cinema built on dialogue, and black and white photography. Less good for: the episodes vary wildly in quality and some are simply flat. There is no plot. Because the same structure repeats eleven times, fatigue sets in during the second half.