Coffee and Cigarettes

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * *)


You might call this slight, charming collection of deadpan vignettes a lifetime's work, since the American indie master of the offbeat, Jim Jarmusch, has been shooting it off and on since 1986 whenever he could catch the right combination of talent in between projects.

Three of the sequences have had limited release as short films which is what they are, really: conceptually, rather than thematically linked, they focus on two or a few people engaging in some of the title's smoking and drinking and talking.

The participants in this collection of conversations are, after a fashion, playing themselves: Cate Blanchett, in one of the two genuinely strong scenes, plays well, Cate Blanchett. Although she's not named, she's an Aussie film star in LA who comes face to face with her sullen cousin (whom she also plays). Elsewhere, a man who may or may not be Bill Murray moonlights in a coffee shop and is recognised by his customers who may or may not be members of a famous hip-hop collective. Steve Buscemi, who also waits on tables, serves Spike Lee's siblings.

If it all sounds a bit self-referential, it is but it's weird enough, in a stoner sort of way, to not feel pretentious. Jarmusch is struggling for the effect of a good short story but these characters' stories are seldom about more than what we see right away. In some ways, each is a cinematic equivalent of one of those Flemish vanitas paintings, a quiet and distilled meditation on the transience of fame or how money doesn't buy love. But only the last sequence, in which Alfred Molina outwits Steve Coogan, has any great narrative heft. As it happens, the two actors are drinking tea. Maybe there was something in the water.

CAST: Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, Steve Buscemi, Steve Coogan, Alfred Molina, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits

DIRECTOR: Jim Jarmusch

RUNNING TIME: 96 mins

RATING: M

SCREENING: Rialto