Carpe Diem in Black and White: Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers

This essay looks at Jim Jarmusch's latest film Broken Flowers. As the tile indicates there is breakage in the narrative of an aging Don Juan who upon receiving an anonymous letter that informs him of his having a son he never knew he had embarks on a quest journey that takes him visiting old flames. The narrative draws heavily on the myth of Don Juan, who after having scored a host of women has to pay for his sins. But while the narrative also draws on all sorts of other representations of Don Juanism, from biblical intertextual references to Mozart's Don Giovanni, and thus relies on a plot development that follows a traditional linear trajectory that has sin and fall in focus, in Jarmusch's rendition the story ends with an open and undecided scene. This paper argues, however, that while Jarmusch makes recourse to all the elements of aesthetic fragmentation, he embeds a moral tale within the film which clashes with the poetics of the fragment as such.