I think whenever you crave a late night out but can't get out of your bed you'd better watch a Jarmusch film instead while lying on your bed under a blanket with a big cup of tea in your hand. The common element that can be traced in all of his films is that he captures these laid-back vibes of such nights to a tee. In Night on Earth, we see nocturnal cityscapes of gloomy, empty streets before getting in a taxi with eccentric yet amicable strangers of different cultures, ceaselessly chatting over trifles of otherwise moral value, all while the tires humming over the asphalt roads and the cool, fresh night air tapping on the car windows. This is basically the whole movie!
The five-segment anthology takes place inside taxi cabs across five different cities on the same titular night. The first one is set in Los Angeles, and features a chain-smoking, gum-chewing, tomboyish taxi driver (Winona Ryder) and a classy casting agent in Hollywood (Gena Rowlands). This is probably my favourite out of all the five vignettes next to the second one, which takes place in New York where a German cabdriver (Armin Mueller-Stahl), with a background that remains ambiguous, is lost in a city and culture he doesn't understand. This one genuinely got a few chuckles out of me. The third episode, that's in Paris, is relatively a bit heavier on its message but is more than made up for it thanks to a brilliant Beatrice Dalle as a woman with hyper-acute senses compensating her lack of sight. In the fourth one, which takes place in Rome, we witness Roberto Benigni being Roberto Benigni as he confesses his sins to a priest (Paolo Bonacelli). The final one taking place in Helsinki is by miles the bleakest of them, imbued with a deadpan undertone but suffused in a sorrowful and grieving tone.
Jim Jarmusch values the brief, ephemeral encounters of people who had never met before, and likely would never meet again. People of nature peculiar to yours but actually quite normal once you get to know them. It's all about everyone's own attitude to life; everyone's priorities shaped by their own environment or according to their life path of their own choosing. And without Jarmusch's signature languorous aura that ties up all the segments together and casts a magical spell on the mundane to turn it to something rather celestial, this night on earth would've been a lackadaisical one with nothing memorable.
