Night on Earth (1991)
Why is nighttime so seductive to poets and fantasists? Jim Jarmusch gets closer than most to answering that question with Night on Earth. The movie shows five taxi rides happening simultaneously across five cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Traveling eastward, each vignette begins later than the last, starting with sunset in Los Angeles and ending with sunrise in Helsinki.
Their moods follow the typical stages of a night out: 7:07 p.m. in Los Angeles is quiet and sincere; 10:07 p.m. in New York is silly and bursting; 4:07 a.m. in Paris is moody and erotic; 4:07 a.m. in Rome is delirious; 5:07 a.m. in Helsinki wanders through the depths of hell before morning commuters shake us back into the prosaic world of daytime. The taxidwellers tell the kinds of stories strangers share in the dark. If you’ve hung out past midnight at a dive bar, you know what I mean.
I was reminded of Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog’s film about Antarctica and the people who work there. They have almost nothing in common except a desire to escape ordinary life: scientists, machinists, and philosophers who dropped off the map only to be caught by the ice at its edges.
The stories in Night on Earth don’t resolve, there’s little action, and no character develops much. Some will find this frustrating. They would be, I imagine, day people. ∎