Two cult figures of contemporary world cinema — Chile’s 87-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky and American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch — have added a large dash of colour and poetry to the Cannes palette this year. The two directors, one known for his cinematic flights of fancy, the other for his steadfast minimalism, have delivered their most accessible works to date, which obviously is the reason why they have become talking points in the ongoing 69th Cannes Film Festival.
Jodorowsky’s latest film Endless Poetry, the second of five proposed creative memoirs which kicked off in 2013 with The Dance of Reality, tracks the cinema savant’s formative years in 1940s and 1950s Santiago, where the foundation of his bohemian imagination was laid. Not surprisingly, Jodorowsky does not hold back in conjuring up a backdrop that delights and excites in equal measure. He packs his film with midgets, clowns and buxom women of the night who expose him to a universe far removed from the one that his father has in mind for him.
The lead character is played by the director’s youngest son, Adan Jodorowsky, as a wide-eyed, ever-eager-to-learn-and-absorb youngster who seeks freedom at all cost. His struggle and its eventual outcome have a strong emotional resonance, making Endless Poetry a truly memorable cinematic experience.
Jarmusch’s Paterson is unlike the phantasmagoric Endless Poetry but it, too, sets out to discover magic in the ordinariness of the life of a New Jersey transit bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, the city of the modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Played by Adam Driver with straight-faced earnestness, Paterson writes poetry in his free time. He is egged on by his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). But Laura, a cupcake chef with a fetish for black and white patterns, has her own dream — she wants to be country singer.
There is little friction in their life except for the occasional growls one hears from the family’s British bulldog Marvin. In Jarmusch’s quirky world, the pooch assumes great centrality, triggering a crisis that threatens to crush Paterson’s spirit. In true Jarmusch fashion, the film is strewn with details that remain unexplained, like the repeated sightings of twins or the pet dog’s rising unease with the neglect that he suffers at the hands of his lost-in-his-thoughts master.
