Permanent Vacation (Jim Jarmusch, 1980)

Like the aimless, "drifting" slacker protagonist it portrays, Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation is itself a nomad of sorts: it follows Allie Christopher Parker around as he wanders around the gritty, largely depilated nondescript New York neighbourhood, listens to the lone saxophone corner blow his horn around the corner, and dances whenever the music pleases him. Despite being a loner who is estranged from his institutionalised mother and not interested in a communal way of living with his roommate (or girlfriend), Leila, Allie is an insightful youth rather mature for his age. He understands he is not cut out for ambitions or goals after which people normally go after in life. He knows all too well about loneliness--"everyone is lonely"--and resorts to drifting around the neighbourhood so that he will not be constantly reminded of his lonesome state.

As a film that blends fiction and documentary, Permanent Vacation places great emphasis on the cityscape in which Allie lives. It plays like a landlocked contemplation on a strange environment that lacks a sense of community. Just like Allie, the other individuals he meets--a veteran who hallucinates that a new war is impending; the withdrawn girl who works at the cinema; a black person in the cinema's lobby sharing a joke; the saxophone player who solos in the depths of night--seem to embody an equal degree of aloneness. It seems that in a city, meeting is always temporary, inter-personal interaction transient: Allie would stop to chat and to listen to these individuals, but then he will be on his way again.

While Allie does not want to become tied down with other people or with New York, and finally decides to leave to Europe by boat, he never seems to be in a rush with how he lives, or with life itself. His naturalistic acting and charming boyish looks endear him to curious viewers. The movie appears to be equally patient and relishes the sights, sounds and smells of the city, with extended takes and non-kinetic editing being key to its moderate pacing. Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie's unadorned yet evocative score that features the latter on saxophone creates a static, near-surreal vacuum in which the streets as well as people are enveloped, a space where time feels stagnant. When the harbour is seen at last, and the boat gets under way, a sense of movement takes over. What will happen to Allie remains a mystery that Jarmusch was contented to leave unsolved. Life is like a permanent vacation, after all.