Coen Brothers never ceased to surprise me. My first impression, a good five years ago, when I watched ‘Big Lebowski’ was – the movie is like a worn out door mat of lower middle class, too impoverished the owner is that he cannot buy a new one; too fanatically obsessed with cleanliness the wife is that she soaps every last woven cord of the mat until it can no longer be picked up by a hand without tearing it into a million pieces.
Today, if there is one director(s) that I cross my fingers and wait impatiently like a third grade child sitting before the school play field in the evening awaiting his father to pick him up, that is coen brothers-joel and ethan coen. It was the second time that it hit me, Lebowski was one of the most adorable characters ever to be created on celluloid. Since then I have seen all of their movies and in the end I was thoroughly devastated, for I had seen all their movies and no movie is the same to watch , second time around. 'Now, there was nothing left. I should have preserved coen brothers for my future'
But, the brothers tirelessly shelled out movies at regular intervals, and all of them are coenish wonders. As of today, I have seen each of the brothers’ movies, three times and more. It just keeps getting better and better. Where do I start? The writer ‘Barton Fink’ who lazes out his life in the city searching for some inspiration, which naggingly evades him throughout only to be consummated in the beach after an ebullient but crafted ending. The business man in ‘Hudsucker proxy’, or should I say, the inventor? What can I say about this tale of an incongruous man, too perspicacious to fit into a pallid firm, freezes time itself? Was it supernatural or was it the brothers’ way of cleverly disguising the inventive yet inane commercialisation of art.
‘oh brother where art thou’ with its lush green fields, country side romanticism and Clooney behind the mike for ‘I am a man of constant sorrow’- this movie’s stunning feeling that is at once prismatic, for the tales loop into each other so horribly that a naïve viewer might feel dizzy. Not me though, for I have been watching brothers for some time now, enough to renounce my pragmatism before sitting to watch any of their movies. ‘Fargo’ was white, snow white, and the tale insinuating. It is as if the brothers are alluding to something else that is not present in the movie, but who am I to judge them? I simply relapse in my swinging chair and let the credits roll on my conscience.
Whether it is 'Miller's Crossing' or the greenish movie (The man who wasn't there) with a tinge of black shadows cast by the most natural elements perhaps, for viewers are not privy to the environment. The movie is sort of claustrophobic, but is still consistent with coen brothers' style-there is a murder, a plot (perhaps non sensical for a naive viewer), and a drama that neither begins in the movie nor ends in it.
‘no country for old men’ blew me. Form ‘blood simple’ to this one, they have remained consistent and yet destructive. There is a beguiling voice and a witchcraft in each of their movies, in every ephemeral comic scene there is a hovering ghost, in every simple movie there is a coenish charisma. Few directors can come close to the brothers’ pursuit of environment. They pull up all the little pieces of cinema, strip them off platitudes and present them naked. But that is not all, for ‘A serious man’ is anything but naked. The movie slogs and wriggles heavily like a new born larva through the uncouth and sharp stingy grass stalks to reach somewhere, nowhere. Is there an end to all this?
‘A serious man’ is serious enough to make you go ‘what was that?’ but if you are a member of the brothers’ world, then you would go ‘like that. Yeah!’
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