Jim Jarmusch
Broken Flowers

Jarmusch film from 2005 starring Bill Murray. The cast includes, among others, Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone. Palme d'Or at Cannes.

In a slow, gloomy, and expressionless exposition, the film unfolds over 96 minutes of difficult digestibility. The almost decrepit and mono-expression Bill Murray re-enacts the somnolent practice of Sofia Coppola's equally obscure film "Lost in Translation," leaving the viewer with more than a few reasonable doubts. It’s an easy assist to extract from the title "Broken Flowers" the meaning of disruption (of the viewer's patience) and the protagonist's demeanor, which the insidious and slippery wandering from place to place without apparent motivation suggests as a gesture of miserable solitude and demotivation towards life, rather than a complacent search for its meaning. The viewer is left with many questions, but as the best critical tradition dictates, it’s good for those who watch to ponder the "unsaid" and strive to read between the lines. An operation that many may find hard to swallow.

If Jim Jarmusch enjoys scattering hints full of somewhat too obscure nuances, describing the scene with clever superficiality and then laying it out in an overly congested manner (more doubts arise than certainties), the viewer is left to put together a massive dose of clues and develop a sense of filmic pleasure through the dramatic key.

The disconcerting thing is probably this: one expects a new film, yet with American reading schemes. After all, the film is presented as a comedy and the protagonist (Murray) is hardly comparable (for historical reasons) to the inaction he has impeccably learned to reproduce. A bit like when you see Jim Carrey and expect a certain type of "acting aroma," but I don't want to put too much on the plate.

It’s not a comedy, it doesn’t have an American movie ending, it doesn’t have unexpected twists or innovative ideas, there are no surprises, no plot twists. We witness a programmed and executed collage, with five different reactions, never a "misstep" in a purely narrative sense, never an answer. To create the collage, an elegant bouquet of flowers “delivered” or ideally to be delivered as a key to access lives that are not parallel to the protagonist's. Yet this man appears so resigned, seemingly confident and firm in his certainties, immovable and content with his existence that it seems absurd that a strange envelope and a neighbor whose interest in him we will never understand urge him on a brief journey that transforms him (or brings out) the desperate nature of a lonely and incomplete man who realizes too late the emptiness around him.

Too many characters are underdeveloped. A lot of symbols here and there (Lolita, the cat, the dense vegetation where Murray stumbles, the field in the middle of nowhere where he wakes up), mixtures of dreams, disruptions, and non-places that encourage the sense of wandering the world in search of something.