Stranger Than Paradise - "Hungarian Blues"

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

K: This is Jim Jarmusch's first movie. It's divided into chapters and he used one of those as a film thesis for college. He then expanded it into a movie. It doesn't feel like a first movie, not monumental like Star Wars and then with nothing more to show after that.

H: It's not his signature movie.

K: No, but it very much has all the settings, and characters, and the look that we come to expect from him.

H: So it's not a defining movie or the one thing that he did that he's known for. But in another way, it's a good beginning movie because it sets the themes for his career.

K: It establishes the unexpected that he likes to play with in his movies.

H: In this movie, what's the unexpected?

K: The crazy coincidences, like the cousin looking like the guy that people are looking for in the funny hat and jacket, when she's given the money. It's out of nowhere, where this one event changes every character. It has nothing to do with them changing, it's something external. He does that in movies.

H: So much of the movie is relatively harmless. Nothing bad happens to the girl, nothing bad happens to the guy or the friend. They just go along. Their lives kind of suck, but it's not that bad. It then takes this one event to raise the stakes and only at the end when they've taken money that's not theirs. Now they're in danger and things change and split.

K: But the danger doesn't even feel that dangerous. The other guys don't know where it came from, only she does. That's when most people would start talking about the movie at that point, but there's so much going on before all that.

H: The beginning is a slow build-up to that.

What did you think about this movie only having three characters, maybe four?

K: Including the Grandma, four. The three characters thing

H: The thing that it makes me think of is the chamber play, like Ingmar Bergman's films. This movie is Bergmanesque because the first two thirds of the movie, you ask "What is this movie even about?" It's just about people talking. It reminds me of Wild Strawberries (1957).

K: They're interesting enough characters though.

H: I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

K: A lot of people couldn't do that. They'd want to build the dialogue with crazy things, they can't just keep things quiet. These characters are really interesting. The main character, the guy, is a gambler and a cheat. And his friend is his accomplice. That could be a whole story right there, but that's not what it's about.

H: There's also, under everything, is Hungary. He's Hungarian but he doesn't like people knowing it. His friend kind of looks like him but is completely American. Then you've got the girl who is completely Hungarian in America. It's kind of like an evolution, not that it's progress. You see how the three of them interact.

K: You also have the older Hungarian.

H: The balance of the movie is shifted toward what it means to be Hungarian in America, but not in a cheezy way, or an overt way, or in a way that matters.

K: It's not even "American", it's how is it to be Hungarian outside of Hungary?

H: You don't get an American sense from it? The whole being on the road and driving from New York to Cleveland to Florida, and the hamburger stand - it's not like the fourth of July and they're shooting fireworks off, but...you have a good point too. It has to do with being an ex-patriot and what that means.

What do you think about the use of that Blues song over and over?

K: Can I ask you that question?

H: I thought it was a really cool song and another element of Americana. She sees America through her cousin and through the song and through working at a hamburger stand. That's how she relates to the culture, but otherwise she doesn't. The American dress that he gets for her she throws in the garbage. She wears big, loose, black, baggy clothes. Part of being Hungarian for her is not being the typical picture of femininity. She wears that goofy hat and those baggy clothes, even on the beach. They all look really strange on the beach because she's wearing the big black clothes, he's wearing a suit, and they look like urban people.

K: They don't fit in anywhere, they're misfits in Ohio.

H: Maybe in New York, because New York's full of misfits.

K: They don't fit in in Florida.

H: Cleveland is less like Ohio than it is like New York. It's a big city. When you say "Ohio", I think of small town, rural Ohio.

K: Seeing them out in the winter and seeing them on the beach with black and white, it looks the same. It's just this vast nothing.

H: You think of Florida as being this pretty, green place, but where they stay is crappy Florida. When they go on vacation, they go to Cleveland in the middle of the winter. They're always inhabiting these vast, vacant spaces. Even in Cleveland you don't see anyone on the street, you just see snow. In Florida, you don't see anyone either because no one stays in that backwater where they went. They're just going from one desert to the next. It's not surreal, it's just symbolic.

You talked about how they were gamblers and cheats, what is there in that?

K: He's taken his Hungarian self and hidden it. He's not going to do the Hungarian thing. He's taken this gambling persona, like "I can fend for myself". So, when she comes, he hides that from her. He doesn't want to take her to the tracks, he doesn't want to let her be involved in that. It's interesting that he's these things that he doesn't want to share with anybody. When she goes, he still wants her to be a part of him. It's really hard because when they get to Florida and here's the chance where they're going to go to the track and win a bunch of money and he can bring her, he pushes her away again. The friend is the foil, saying let's go we should bring her.

H: She shows him that she can be a better cheat than he can, because they come back having lost a lot of money and she comes back with all this criminal money. She didn't earn it and the most she did wrong was accept the money, but she shows him that she's a better criminal than he is.

The common conception of America is that we're either cowboys or we're gangsters. He chose to take on the second, not a gangster necessarily but a grifter, a conman, a cheat. He's taking the "American is the land of opportunity" - it's an opportunity to better yourself, but it's also an opportunity for you to steal from the people who are bettering themselves. It's a criminal paradise.

He and his friend look menacing in an awkward way, but they're really harmless. They're completely sensitive guys. For vacation, they go to visit the guy's cousin. They have no teeth.

What did you think of the ending? Were you frustrated by it?

K: I wasn't frustrated by it. I liked it. It wasn't a big statement about life, it was playing with the idea that things can change pretty big for them. There are huge changes, but that's not what the story's about. You're not going to see the result of those changes.

H: You wouldn't want to see that. It was a good place to end the story. So, why did he go to Hungary?

K: The easy thing to say would be, "Oh, he just really wanted to look for her and he followed through too much." Maybe she reminded him or gave him a sense of what he needed and what he liked. Maybe going to Hungary would help him.

H: He didn't treat her that well when they were living together. He always treated her like a kid that didn't know anything. Why, then, was he so interested in following her around?

K: When she left, he realized that he liked having her around.

H: It definitely seemed nonsexual though. Even the friend was kind of interested in her, but never in a way that he would ever act on.

K: No, she was like their little sister. But, she didn't think of them in any sort of way except guys she knew. She went to the movies with them and they acted like her big brothers but she wasn't interested in any of them.

H: She was only interested in what she wanted to do. It didn't really matter what other people thought. She was sort of defiant.

The friend ends up getting stuck holding the bag. The real question is what is he going to do?

K: He's screwed.

H: Yeah, because he's a follower. He just did what the other guy told him to do.

K: What do you think she does?

H: Goes back to working at the hamburger stand probably.

K: I think she goes to New York. She took a lot of the money.

H: She probably wouldn't go back to work, but maybe she'd go back to living with the aunt. She wasn't too crazy about Cleveland though. She didn't seem that crazy about New York either.

K: Maybe she'd stay in Florida. She really wanted to see Florida and they did it for her, but she really wanted to see real Florida.

H: Maybe she'll go to Hungary.

When I try to say the title of this movie, I always say Trapped in Paradise (1994) instead of "Stranger than Paradise". It would be really funny if you switched the three characters in that movie (Nicholas Cage, Dana Carvey, and Jon Lovitz) with the three characters in this movie. It would be funny if Jon Lovitz played the girl.