How to understand when to run away.

Down by Law Jim Jarmusch The year was 1992, beginning of the April, I lived in Sarajevo (Bosnia) at the time. My building looked out to the street dividing Serbian and Muslim territory, my window to the other side. Going out was a risk, since you never knew where the snipers were and how many of them are there. TV played many national songs, and concentrated itself on playing movies whenever there were no important news. It was there I first encountered the work of Jim Jarmusch, sort of forced to be a prisoner in my own home, looking for something to relax with.

The movie Down by Law (1988) started with a portrait of poor Americans that had something so joyous about them, with a familiar music by Tom Waits and I stopped the channel surfing there. Later on, I learned about the Wim Wenders' influence on Jarmusch, exploration of loneliness, actually not loneliness as much as the exploration of the people forgotten by the society; shot entirely in black and white, it follows Jarmusch's two previous works 'Stranger than Paradise' and 'Permanent Vacation' in topic and genre. This time the story was Jarmusch's answer to the old Hollywood prison escape movies. It's about two deadbeats, one former disc jockey Zach (Tom Waits) that was just thrown by his girlfriend out of his apartment for not bringing any money into the house for a long time, that gets set up with a dead body in the car while he thought he was helping out a person he thought was his friend. The other one, a pimp, Jack (John Lurie) that does not know how to be tough in his line of business, a pimp that dreams about shiny future, gets a run-around from his prostitutes, gets framed with 10 year old girl in his bed. In their lives comes Roberto (Benigni), Italian immigrant, full of hopes but with almost no knowledge of the English language. By the time Roberto tried to talk to Zach, and Zach responded 'Buzz off', Roberto wrote that down as a new way of saying 'hi', Roberto responded with 'Buzz of to you too', and wrote it down together with 'Good day to you sir', I was laughing like crazy. I did not care that in the park down in front of my building people were shooting, the misery of the idea of the real world stopped existing. Back in the movie, Zach and Jack were put into the same jail cell and simply did not know how to interact, whatever they did, they failed miserably. Roberto, puny character as opposed to the other two, who killed the guy in the meantime, gets into their cell. Jarmusch takes time and effort to establish the characters, make them interact with one another. He lightens up their days, he conjures up the way for them to escape, takes them across the swamp and even gets engaged, while two of

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