Down by Law (1986)

Jim Jarmusch's 1986 study of three men failing to escape Louisiana, and then succeeding, arrives from a decade that had not yet learned to instruct its audience. The picture concerns a disc jockey, a pimp, and an Italian tourist, all of them played by white men, and the Black performers who appear in the New Orleans sequences populate the margins without the film pausing to explain them. This is period casting, not statement casting. The women, Laurette and Nicoletta, drift through the frame as reasons for men to be somewhere, and the screenplay has no interest in correcting that arrangement. Two of them, in fairness, get a restaurant and a marriage out of it.

The title carries a double meaning about brotherhood among the oppressed, which is as close as the film comes to a thesis, and it declines to develop the thought. There is no economic sermon, no environmental lament over the bayou, no celebration of bodies, no diagnosis of the eccentric Bob as anything other than a comic Italian with a billiard ball and a talent for fractured English. The swamps are photographed for their texture. Robby Müller's black-and-white camera lingers on wet wood and empty streets because it likes them, not because they signify. We are asked to watch, and that is the whole transaction.

What the film does possess is an allergy to preaching. Jarmusch hands us three irritable men, a rabbit, a fork in the road, and lets them part without hostility. No lesson is delivered. No character turns to the lens to summarize the human condition. In an era that has since trained its cinema to explain itself at length, this restraint reads as almost exotic. The film is small, strange, and entirely content to remain so. It scores, by the standards we are obliged to apply, very near the bottom, and it seems pleased about that.