Review: ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ is a Fun Series of Vignettes
Jim Jarmusch’s star-studded anthology film is inconsistent, but with high highs
Coffee and Cigarettes is a collection of eleven short films, all surrounding different star-studded casts as they, fittingly, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Filmed between 1986 and 2003, the film captures the suave mundanity that makes the work of director Jim Jarmusch so intriguing and so effective. Though being split into eleven parts and filmed over almost twenty years does mean that the film is irreparably inconsistent — sometimes genuinely fascinating, other times lacklustre — Coffee and Cigarettes is of interest more than often enough to warrant viewing.
The film also sees re-occurring characters from some of Jarmusch’s other features. Roberto Benigni plays a very similar role in the vignette ‘Strange to Meet You’ as he does in Jarmusch’s feature Down by Law, for example. Two members of the Wu-Tang Clan, GZA and RZA (the latter made the score for Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai), drink tea with Bill Murray (who starred in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and The Dead Don’t Die after the release of Coffee and Cigarettes) in ‘Delirium’. They don’t play the same characters as before, but their appearances still bring connotations of Jarmusch’s other works with them.
