“Stranger Than Paradise” (1984)
In a recent interview for Marc Maron’s “WTF” Podcast, jazzman, painter, national treasure and “Stranger Than Paradise” star John Lurie revealed that his buddy, director Jim Jarmusch, had originally conceived his first real feature film as an ambitious and radical (and, as Lurie candidly admits, terrible) sci-fi picture. How lucky we are, then, that Lurie talked his friend out of that idea, and that the two instead made this deadpan, deeply loving road movie that finds discursive poetry in the winding, desolate freeways of America. “Stranger Than Paradise” is more than just the ultimate manifestation of Jarmusch’s aesthetic: It’s one of the definitive films of the early ’80s independent movement, inspiring like-minded creatives such as Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith to pick up cameras themselves and start shooting with their friends. The story of two deadbeat card sharks and a charming Ukrainian woman who just want to “get out of town and see something different for a few days,” “Stranger Than Paradise” remains, for many, the archetypical Jarmusch experience. The minimalist cool, the idiosyncratic references to high and low culture, the gently bemused tone — it’s all there. The film is ultimately about the invisible connective tissue that binds the chaos of New York tenement life to the flatlands of Florida, and also the unspoken loyalties of outsiders and the wondrous universality of life — in other words, how it’s really just “the same Chesterfields, all over America.”
“She’s Gotta Have It” (1986)
It was back in 1989 when Spike Lee’s incendiary neighborhood call-to-arms “Do The Right Thing” triggered waves of uncertainty and alarm at Cannes. Its content was inflammatory, its tone satirical and outraged. Three years earlier however, a younger, perhaps mellower Spike presented his proper debut “She’s Gotta Have It” to international audiences on the Croisette, where it was met with unprecedented enthusiasm. Like most of Lee’s work, “She’s Gotta Have It” is concerned with some potentially volatile issues: mainly sexual politics, feminism and the changing face of Brooklyn (specifically Fort Greene) at the time. Yet it addresses these points in a witty, lightly barbed comic fashion that is blessedly bereft of the finger-pointing that mars some of the filmmaker’s later work. Along with Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” and the early cinema of John Sayles and Hal Hartley, Lee’s debut is largely considered to be one of the defining works of its era, even if it’s one of his calmer films. In fact, Lee’s first film is so comparatively understated when juxtaposed with the rest of his filmography that it’s possible to underestimate just how far the influence of “She’s Gotta Have It” reaches today. Certainly recent works like Justin Simien’s “Dear White People” and Rick Famuyiwa’s “Dope” would have been practically inconceivable without it. And it’s no wonder why: “She’s Gotta Have It” is one of Lee’s very best, as well as a reassuring reminder of what he is capable of.
“Matewan” (1987)
Few filmmakers have seemed better suited to the idea of Cannes than John Sayles. Sayles has always been a political filmmaker in his way: His sympathies lie with the marginalized, the lower classes, the downtrodden and poor. The director’s humanist tendencies and ear for the poetic speech of ordinary men and women made him perhaps the only director that could take the Matewan coal miner’s strike of 1920 and make devastating, resonant drama out of it. A tale of tough times and compromised morals in the grim, grey hills of West Virginia, “Matewan” boasts Sayles’ typically astute ear for regional dialogue and features fantastic performances from many of the director’s regular stable of actors, including Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and Gordon Clapp. Add Haskell Wexler’s painterly cinematography and the Appalachian-influenced score of the director’s regular composer Mason Daring, and you’ve got one of the quintessential indies of the 1980s, and another fine portrait of American life from the always-interesting Sayles.
“Metropolitan” (1990)
The 1990 screening of “Metropolitan” at the Director’s Fortnight is responsible, to some degree, for introducing international audiences to the cinematic voice of writer/director Whit Stillman. And what a voice Stillman’s was: wry, erudite and full of penetrating truth about the young and well-heeled. Like the characters of Noah Baumbach’s later “Kicking And Screaming,” another tonally similar comedy about brainy college-age kids drifting in an apathetic vacuum, the characters of “Metropolitan” are too smart for the kinds of insipid conversation you’d overhear at a bar, and yet for all their upper-class trappings and book learning, they’re still hopelessly unprepared for life outside of school. The death of the yuppie age is on the horizon as “Metropolitan” opens, and our central circle of characters acknowledge its looming inevitability with a sort of resigned gallows humor: How long can the good times last? Even if we don’t all come from the same privileged environment depicted in the film, surely we’ve all wondered about the shelf life of our own youth. In spite of the opulent, somewhat alienating world that the film depicts, “Metropolitan’s” message is one that will resonate with anyone who’s ever been caught in the terrifying grey area where growing up ends and adult responsibility begins.
“To Sleep With Anger” (1990)
Charles Burnett only directed a few films from 1977 to 1990, the foremost being the stunning “Killer Of Sheep,” a landmark of African-American cinema that examines the unyielding sense of community embedded within the crime-plagued metropolis of Watts, Los Angeles, shortly after the riots of 1965 almost saw the entire neighborhood eat itself alive. Burnett’s movie has gone on to influence everything from David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” to “Inherent Vice,” which pays tribute to it in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it throwaway gag. However, Burnett’s 1990 drama, “To Sleep With Anger” is an equally complicated and challenging film, and one that examines many of the same themes that pop up in “Killer Of Sheep.” Another intimate social tapestry set in the tight-knit South Central, Los Angeles, community, “To Sleep With Anger” cost $1.4 million to make — small potatoes by today’s jumbo-sized standards, but certainly a pretty penny for Burnett, whose early films (including his second, “My Brother’s Wedding”) are about as bare-bones as they come. The film was a critical success, though: Burnett won four Independent Spirit Awards, one for Best Director and the other for Best Screenplay, and was also honored with the Special Jury Recognition Award at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. The film was also a major showcase for actor Danny Glover following the lucrative success of the “Lethal Weapon” movies, and it teased at the kind of raw human emotion the actor would later expand upon in films as diverse as Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” and John Sayles’ “Honeydripper.”
