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Even for Jim Jarmusch, and even for my taste, his virtual no budget feature film debut “Permanent Vacation” can be a little too slow, and a little too opaque, and as it sometimes goes with student films (he shot it while still enrolled in NYU film school), occasionally just feels like a canvas for his diary entries and to show the world his vision board. And yet. If there are times during its hour-and-fourteen-minute run time when I felt myself tuning out, there were just as many moments when I was transfixed, not suggesting or hinting at Jarmusch’s future but they, themselves, implicit evidence of his already existent talent while also setting the table for the ideas and themes that would intrigue him.
“Permanent Vacation” begins by cutting between scenes of a teeming New York City and a desolate one of people just outside society. Some seem to want it that way, like Aloysius ‘Allie’ Parker (Chris Parker). Purposely out of time with his pompadour, uninspired by traditional ambitions or motivations, Allie is not so much a cultural tourist as a life tourist, meaning he goes on less of a journey than an aimless wander. He encounters likeminded folks, such as the young woman serving popcorn (Lisa Rosen) at a movie theater who seems more interested in her book than her job, and he encounters people who have wound up on the fringes of society not exactly by choice, like the veteran (Richard Boes) evidently suffering from PTSD that Allie encounters. When he does, we hear bombs and helicopters on the soundtrack, and though it took me a minute to get there, I realized that Allie was essentially passing through someone else’s reality. The grace Allie shows him, it’s truly moving.
Allie’s opening voiceover essentially tells us right up front that this is all in the past tense, that he is just someone passing through, and when he writes his name in graffiti on some cement wall, it’s like a punk rock version of Brooks Was Here. “Permanent Vacation” ends with Allie moving on, the camera aboard a boat hastily putting the island and WTC in the rearview mirror, a shot Jarmusch is content to hold for a long time, evoking his Zen tendencies, the end of one thing, the beginning of another, permanent impermanence, but also his indie bona fides. The shot suggests the concluding one of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” though without any fancy time lapse photography. Sometimes all you have to do is set up a camera on the Staten Island Ferry and let it roll.
