Three people in a car, traveling in America, two men and a young woman.
They drive south, in the middle of winter, to escape the cold and the sadness that lies on the facades of the houses.
But in Florida, with more sunshine, the same gloom prevails, and the dollars you bring with you are soon lost.
By chance, the three of them make money again, but they go their separate ways: Willie gets on a plane to Europe in Miami, Eddie brings the car back to New York, and Eva ends up sitting alone in the motel.
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Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
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That was "Stranger than Paradise", the film that made Jim Jarmusch internationally known after ten years studying literature and film and a half-hearted career as a poet and musician.
Another four decades have passed since then, but the film has held up well because it's still at odds with everything we're used to in the cinema.
"Stranger than Paradise" is black and white, he works with original sound and he doesn't give a damn about what you might call the cinematic illusion.
Instead, he shows us calm, almost static images that are as beautiful as if a Walker Evans or Robert Frank had composed them with his camera.
And the story follows these images instead of dragging them behind it, what is seen precedes what is told.
In America, auteur cinema is called independent film, and Jim Jarmusch is one of its inventors.
In a country where there is almost no federal film funding, that means balancing on a razor blade: between the aspiration to challenge the almighty Hollywood on its own turf and the travail of funding that dream;
between the effort to find a cinematic style that goes beyond the usual narrative forms and the danger that this style will become a mistake and a scam.
Jarmusch accomplished this balancing act for forty years, and while he occasionally stumbled in the process - less for financial reasons than for artistic reasons - his cinema always found its balance: the failed Ghost Dog was followed by Broken Flowers, on "Only Lovers Left Alive" the wonderful "Paterson", and also the zombie film "The Dead Don't Die" from 2019 will certainly not be his last word in the cinema.
The series of masterpieces that began in 1986 with "Down By Law" and led to "Dead Man" via "Mystery Train" and "Night on Earth" will not be imitated anyway.
The great film critic Pauline Kael already thought of the name Beckett when she read "Stranger than Paradise".
Where his theater teaches you to listen carefully, she wrote, you learn to look closely with Jarmusch.
That still applies.
The lonely taxi drivers, convicts, musicians, poets, businesswomen, hit men, bohemians, western heroes and vampires that his films tell are our companions on the journey to a more awake, re-enchanted world, a reality beyond Hollywood.
Hopefully for a long time.
This Sunday Jim Jarmusch, the eternally young grandfather of American auteur films, turns seventy.