Coffee and Cigarettes
The relative scarcity of anthology films contributes to an unease with their lack of narrative cohesion in much the same way someone reading a collection of short stories for the first time might get to the end and, in desperation and frustration, rapidly flip back through the pages as if to spot the technicolor threads binding each story together. The joy is in spinning the threads yourself, not spotting them!
(That's not to suggest the through-lines in Coffee and Cigarettes are particularly subtle. Many are textual: as if the titular motifs and the various displays of vaguely anonymous cafés weren't enough, characters echo other characters' prior lines verbatim, perhaps most obviously and symbolically in the Nikola Tesla line — that the earth is a conductor of acoustical resonance.)
Regardless of narrative structure, though, I found the film straightforwardly entertaining by the second or third segment, once I felt like I had really gotten used to its vibe. (The first segment in particular caught me off guard and suggested a much more surreal film than the ten which followed it.) And from then on out, I started to understand this film to be an exploration — both earnest and comedic — of the ways people try to connect with one another, and the ways people try to seek refuge in consumption, and the overlap of those two things.
I am surprised to discover that people think of this as a boring film, but perhaps that is my biases showing. Most scenes are, to re-use a parallel, like a well-crafted short story: exactly the right length to land the punches they wish to before departing. And I will remember this film more by its trees than its forest:
- the sheepish way Iggy Pop, after awkwardly dismissing Tom Waits despite their kindred spirit, reaches for a second cigarette, hoping no one catches him doing so;
- the shadows falling on Alfred Molina's face as he is finally and explicitly rejected by Steve Coogan, both of whom playing fictionalized versions of themselves to great effect;
- the angelic notes of Janet Baker summoned as if to suggest a bright and beckoning afterlife awaiting the protagonists of the final segment, who, pretending for sport that their coffee is champagne, takes one last celebratory sip.