Behind a great movie there is usually a very simple question that, sooner or later, outside the theater, we all end up making ourselves.

Let us say that writing tends to revolve around a fundamental question, not so much to find an answer as to formulate it. In a way, the merit of every narrative is measured by the clarity with which it manages to formulate that question that inspires it.

In the case of Paterson, Jim Jarmusch's last film, the success is total, the same question runs with great precision and sincerity in every scene, from the first one to the last one: How to lead a full life, far from apathy and  tedium, in an existence marked by routine, monotony and economic pressures that force us to give up dreams?

Jarmusch, possibly the most important American director of the last generations, assumes his responsibility as an artist and offers an answer bluntly: through poetry. His stance is brave and direct, remembering that of great Latin American narrators like Cortazar or García Marquez: life can be bland or fantastic, everything depends on our ability to live it in a poetic way.

Perhaps it would suffice to say that Paterson is, in itself, a poem in film form. As it already did in Ghost Dog (1999), Jarmusch often occupies the extension of the screen with letters that are forming verses. The time of the narration, punctuated by repetitions of the routine - alarm, coffee, work, lunch, homecoming, beer - and the passage of days announced in signs, flows as if it were a sonnet, forming a regular metric, soft and relaxed. There are silences full of color and planes full of silence. Maybe no other director knows how to handle the rhythm in pictures like Jarmusch does. There are long shots of warm landscapes, waterfalls and deserted avenues, and also long black hair, the face of the beloved woman who slowly mixes and overlaps with falling water.

So much beauty in a decadent New Jersey town named Paterson, picked up by the look of a bus driver also named Paterson (Adam Driver, known for his participation in the Girls series, Adam Sackler), which is, of course, A sad irony. It is as if from his birth, the young protagonist had been destined to travel the same streets of the small forgotten town that saw him take his first steps. So Paterson ends, in effect, driving a bus, doing the same journey days after days in his native Paterson.

Repetition, monotony, boredom, routine. But no, none of that. From the windows of his enormous machine, Paterson looks at life as if it were a painting, discovering amazing details that often go unnoticed; With the same interest he listens to the conversations of his passengers, which often border on the absurd and the unreal; Lunchtime is spent meditating  on a wooden bench, watching a huge waterfall that falls between two mountains; the small jolts of routine, a mechanical breakdown, a tense episode of jealousy between a couple, lives them with serenity and responsibility. 

On the way home, a sweet and disaffected wife (Golshifteh Farahani) awaits him, more like a girl than an adult woman. Together they have built a small sanctuary of tranquility. There is also a dog, a grumpy bulldog opposed to its owner, and a poorly lit local bar, attended by a good-hearted music lover who has the habit of playing solo chess. At the end of the day, everything is going to give a notebook of poems that Paterson secretly entertains in his basement and in which he works constantly but without anxiety during the day. Life, for Paterson, is that, an inexhaustible source of poetry.

Thus, following the day of a bus driver, Jarmusch offers in this wonderful film the sober and rested portrait of a simple, sensitive and brave man, who above all has the talent to be happy.