USA,
1991, 125 min
Shown in 1992
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jim Jarmusch
- prod
-
Jim Jarmusch, Demetra J. MacBride
- scr
-
Jim Jarmusch
- cam
-
Frederick Elmes
- editor
-
Jay Rabinowitz
- cast
-
Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Espisito, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez, Isasch De Bankloé, Béatrice Dalle, Roberto Benigni
- source
-
Fine Line Features
OTHER
This is Jim Jarmusch’s most humane and poignant film to date, laced, as always, with the oblique humor that has become synonymous with his name (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, Mystery Train). Night on Earth is composed of five separate stories, set in different cities, that have no direct connection except that they each record the private moments shared between a cabbie and a passenger within the confines of a taxi: The LA cabbie is unaffected by the power her passenger wields with a cellular phone; Helmut, the eager East German driver, is so hilariously uncoordinated that he trades roles with his desperate passenger; a temperamental French cab driver meets his match in a young blind woman; the irrepressible Italian cabbie makes an outrageously scandalous confession to his demure Vatican passenger; and, finally, the dour and fragile Helisinki driver voices his private agony to three seemingly tough and drunken workers. Whereas Jarmusch’s earlier films represented the filmmaker's sense of being a foreigner in a strange land, Night on Earth draws its characters from the melting pot of human experience.
—Alberto Garcia, Sundance Film Festival
FACTOID #188
According to an item in the 1969 Halloween edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Swedish director Bo Widerberg cancelled a Festival tribute at the last minute with a cryptic telegram from Stockholm that read, ’Sorry impossible to come. Must stay in bed.’
