E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lost to the world Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	Coffee and Cigarettes Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch. With Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett, Jack White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, and Bill Murray. A United Artists release (96 minutes). At the Coolidge Corner.

Jim Jarmusch’s 11-part anthology of odd encounters opens with deceptive admissions of slightness. In the first episode ("Strange To Meet You"), caffeinated Roberto Benigni switches places with bemused Steven Wright. In the second ("Twins"), a waiter in a sports jacket (Steve Buscemi) unloads Elvisology on two squabbling visitors to Memphis (Joie and CinquŽ Lee).

Behind the air of relaxation and inconsequence that’s so disarming about these two vignettes, thematic lines already become apparent: duality, celebrity, one person substituting for another. As Coffee and Cigarettes unfolds, it accumulates a thematic weight that, along with the film’s considerable formal inventiveness (how many ways can Jarmusch find to shoot and cut scenes of two or three people having coffee in restaurants? Plenty . . . . ), makes it fascinating.

Throughout the film, people who should get along (because they’re linked by blood relation, by what they do, or by their interests) turn against each other, for no other reason than an arbitrary, ornery will to disagree and distinguish themselves. In each dueling couple, one partner is nice and eager to please and the other is combative and arrogant. Iggy Pop makes every effort to accommodate Tom Waits in "Somewhere in California," the third episode, but Waits puts him on and insults him. A barely veiled hostility lingers through the next two episodes, both exercises in noncommunication: "Those Things’ll Kill Ya" (set in front of a portrait of steely character actor Henry Silva) and "RenŽe," in which a mysterious hipster (RenŽe French) deplores what a waiter (E. J. Rodriguez) does to her coffee. In the tour de force "Cousins," Cate Blanchett plays both a famous star on a publicity junket and the star’s insolent, awkward, resentful cousin. In "Cousins?", the funniest and most incisive episode, Alfred Molina tries to make a connection with Steve Coogan (the two play themselves, ostensibly, as do Iggy and Waits), having determined through his genealogical researches that they are cousins, but the latter keeps aloof.

Why all these disagreements? The key to the film is the sixth and central episode, "No Problem," in which two old friends, played by Alex Descas and Isaach De BankolŽ, meet after a long separation. Descas has asked De BankolŽ to join him for coffee, and the latter is sure that some distress lies behind the seemingly innocent invitation ("Are you sure there’s nothing you wanted to tell me?"). "No Problem" crystallizes the tension between simplicity and the expectation of complexity that’s constant throughout the film. De BankolŽ insists that there must be a problem (because otherwise, why are they there? — a question that any of Jarmusch’s characters might pose); Descas denies the existence of a problem with a stubbornness, and a refusal to look into the matter further, that hints at hostility.

Much of the pleasure of the film lies in its sensual contemplation of an abstracted world. "Jack [White] Shows Meg [White] His Tesla Coil," set under a portrait of Lee Marvin, is the lushest episode, and the boldness with which it’s edited is itself a tribute to one of Marvin’s best directors, Samuel Fuller. In most of the episodes, Jarmusch cuts to overhead shots of the tables where his characters sit, highlighting the tables’ chessboard motif (Coffee and Cigarettes is shot in a crisp black-and-white that emphasizes the blacks and the whites). The abstract gameboard space underlines the removal from ordinary life that Coffee and Cigarettes insists on, even while the characters pursue such banal topics as that most ordinary of mysteries, the harmony between coffee and tobacco. All the characters have temporarily left their normal lives: the twins in the second episode are on vacation; the two British actors in "Cousins" meet in a Los Angeles to which fame has not accustomed them; in "Delirium," famous movie star Bill Murray is found working as a waiter. In the last episode, "Champagne," Taylor Mead and Bill Rice listen to Gustav Mahler’s "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have become lost to the world"), a song title that couldn’t be more appropriate. The long shadows that surround the two men make of the episode an eloquent twilight envoi.