The aliens who are incompatible may not all come from thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. Sometimes they are the ordinary people we see in our lives. The unique temperament makes them feel like they come from a spiritual land, a foreign land of the soul.
The protagonist of the film is such a somewhat special bus driver, who has the same name as his hometown: Patterson. His daily job is to drive a bus in the small town of Paterson, New Jersey. The unchanging job does not obliterate the interest of his life. Sometimes he listens to the words of passengers, sometimes through the windshield to observe this city that has long been ignored. His greatest hobby is writing poetry, and he keeps the ancient habit of handwriting on a notepad without using a mobile phone.
Every night he walks his bulldog, Marvin, to a nearby bar for a drink and chats with the bartender about anecdotes that aren't new to Patterson. He has a dynamic wife, Laura, who nurtures his artistic pursuits, and he unconditionally supports and encourages her many interests.
Paterson's Paterson, Driver's driver... From the title of the film, the director has hidden these interesting coincidences. The mirror correspondence worth pondering in the film is far more than these two: the twins who frequently appear in the same dress, the actress who looks like his wife Laura in the old movie, and the same love of writing poems in notebooks as Patterson little girl.
This mirror correspondence also gradually blurs the boundary between the virtual and the real. A sleepy-eyed Laura told Patterson she had a dream that they had twins. So it makes the recurring twins seem like surreal projections of consciousness. Two young boys on the bus talk about the gun murder of black boxer Rubin Carter in a bar. A few days later, a similar episode took place at a bar Patterson visited every night, adding a twist to the otherwise placid life.
Patterson seems to enjoy life's funny coincidences and repetitions, as much as his inner poetic romance. At the end of a day at work, he would sit on the sofa, his eyes wandering between Marvin the bulldog and the portrait of the bulldog on the wall, as if the two had a mysterious connection (there are many such in the film) offbeat clips, creating a lot of silent humor); after the bus broke down, when asked for the third time if the bus would explode into a big fireball (perhaps in homage to Ron Padgett's 1969 collection of poems, that At 27 years old, about the same age as Patterson), he finally couldn't help laughing. These coincidences and repetitions are like the rhymes of poetry, punctuating a life that repeats itself like neat lines.
You can go a step further and use dualism to interpret these paired complementary images, like Laura's favorite color black and white, or Patterson's crappy meme about William Carlos Williams or Carlo Williams Carlos . Black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, good and bad, but also in line with Westerners' inexplicable fascination with Eastern metaphysics. The movie examines the gains and losses, the good and the bad, in life with such warm eyes. No one would have imagined that Laura, who was always in the middle of the night, would be successful in the cupcake business, or that Patterson's beloved pit bull would crunch his most cherished collection of poems. Life is so fickle, and even if your life is as regular as a clock, you can't keep it going forever.
"Sun still rises every morning and sets every evening."
The infatuated black brother who contributed the most dramatic conflict in the film also contributed the largest chicken soup in the film. But Patterson didn't seem to need such relief, the Bulldog quickly got his forgiveness, and life returned to peace. Those poems are not just black and white on the book, but also Patterson's inner tranquility and calm indifference.
"They are just words, written on water."
Patterson described his poems like his attitude towards life: the leaves are silent, the autumn water is silent. Jiamusu sketched lightly, sketching the faint ripples.
This article was first published on the subscription number of "Three Familiar Movie Reviews": MediumRare
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