Avant Cinema: 'Permanent Vacation'

“You could call Aloysius Parker, PERMANENT VACATION's protagonist, just a bum. He would probably state it with more beatnik-y eloquence. Lacking employment or any non-institutionalized family, Aloysius roams freely through decimated late-seventies N.Y.C., establishing the rich Jarmuschian structure of the eccentric’s journey from the orbit of one fellow eccentric to another. He makes his teenage- pompadour-wearing, herky-jerky-proto-rockabillying way from a slip-clad, Lautréamont-reading lady-friend… Show more to a delusional ‘Nam vet to a slow jokester loitering in a theater to a lonely saxman. He also visits his insane mom, steals a car, sells the stolen car, and hops a boat to Paris. All part of, as he says during the final bit of narration, his permanent vacation.”

“Chris Parker, who plays Aloysius, actually lived like this, never working, bouncing from couch to owned-by-someone-who’s-barely-an-acquaintance couch. Sometimes Jarmusch and his crew couldn’t find Parker when it came time to shoot, but they only had to call around to get an idea of where he might surface next. By taking Parker’s lifestyle and building a full-length, color-saturated, hauntingly atmospheric cinematic drama around it, Jarmusch somehow ambitiofies the unambitious. It helps the film’s mythos even more that he financed it with scholarship money meant to pay his tuition, which p~~~~d off N.Y.U. enough that it denied him his degree.” (Colin Marshall, Jim Jarmusch: Permanent Vacation, 27 April 2011)

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