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…