Mystery Train
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“Sometimes even the greatest love can last only one week"
Overview
An incredibly cool cult classic, Jim Jarmusch’s beloved Mystery Train follows three bluesy stories over the course of a day in Memphis, Tennessee. An Elvis-obsessed Japanese couple embark on a blues tourist trail, a young Italian widow (Nicoletta Braschi) finds herself stranded overnight, and Joe Strummer, Steve Buscemi and Rick Aviles blunder themselves into a liquor store holdup. Linking them all is the Arcade Hotel, a flea-bag flophouse where all our lost souls eventually wind up, tended by Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee (Spike Lee's brother) as the eccentric night clerk and his awkward bell boy.
Why See This Film
Winning the Best Artistic Achievement Award at Cannes, beautifully shot in rich colour by the legendary Robby Müller, set to a stacked soundtrack of blues classics (plus a score by John Lurie) with a loaded bohemian cast, Mystery Train is one of Jarmusch’s dreamiest (and again, one of his coolest) hang-outs. A liminal love letter to blues, Cark Perkins, Elvis Presley and their legacies, this triptych of drifting stories is, as critic Lucy Sante put it, "a meditation on nighttime and transience, on rhythm-and-blues and the city of Memphis", one that washes over you and whisks you away before fading away at dawn.
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