Paterson

Cult director Jim Jarmusch's new film "Paterson" is a slow-paced tribute to the virtue of a simple and well-lived life and the charm of variations and small details in everyday routine. The center of the story is a man named Paterson (Adam Driver known from the TV series "Girls" and the latest "Star Wars" movie) who works as a bus driver in a small town called Paterson near New York. Similar to the hidden talents of the main character, beneath the prosaic surface of this film story with an extremely genuine sense of place, there beats a zenic verse with much deeper layers and currents, borne from Jarmusch's empathic philosophy of life, and as a result, a kind of meditative reflection on the themes of intertwining and bumping parallels in life, general cyclicity and meaningful coincidences emerges from this film experience. Jarmusch's "Paterson" is a heartwarmingly likable story that, in our modern cramming and online exhibitionism, seems like a brightly familiar postcard from a parallel world breathing in a completely different rhythm. With what formula the maestro has managed to capture all this so perfectly and catch it in the can is a mystery in itself -- as it tends to be with good poetry. Kaarin Piiskoppel / PÖFF