Stranger than Paradise

"Is Cleveland a little bit like Budapest?"-"Eddie, shut up!" The debonair and phlegmatic crook Willie (John Lurie) doesn't like being asked about his Hungarian roots and he is less than thrilled when his cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) from Hungary shows up at his house in New York on her way to visit her Aunt Lotte in Cleveland. A year later - Eva has long gone - Willie and his buddy Eddie set out to rescue her from the Midwestern winter and the eccentric aunt. All the individual vignettes of this laconic road comedy are punctuated by passages of black space, which simultaneously provide structure and rhythm, as images and sounds float for a moment in the dark. Like unspoken words, which is not something this film lacks. (mg)