In a short segment called ‘Tuileries’ in the anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006), an American tourist sits at a subway station in Paris waiting for his train.
Now what if we weren’t told that this was directed by the Coens? What if we just paused the film at this point and thought of the different possible ways it could go.
He could get on the train, meet a stranger, and hatch a little murder plot, à la Hitchcock. Or, he could go the Linklater way and start talking to a fellow traveller only to realise that this may be the start of another kind of journey as well.
But since this is a Coen Brothers’ film, our man doesn’t even get to go on the train. In a typically sudden and bizarre turn of events, his eyes stray and momentarily rest on a couple waiting on the other side of the tracks. And there is no going back.
Wide-ranging topics
American filmmakers have often been defined by the genres they have chosen to work with, and cinema audiences have built their expectations accordingly: a geeky engagement with pop culture and cinema history from Tarantino; dark amoral thrillers from Fincher; explosive action from Michael Bay; and so on.
One of the few filmmakers who have consistently defied such categorisation are Joel and Ethan Coen. Famously playing with audience expectations, they have offered a heady mix of genres, styles and characters in their films, so that the only thing one expects from a Coen brothers film is to be surprised.
Twisting the plotlines
The opening frame of their 1996 film, Fargo, claims that it is based on a true story that took place in Minnesota in 1987. Except that it isn’t, a fact now well-known in film lore. And this is only the first of many tricks the film plays on its viewers. At first glance, the stage seems set for a classic noir: the film’s frosty, bleak, Midwestern setting, a deal struck in a seedy café, a car salesman who wants his wife kidnapped, a pair of murderous thugs who mercilessly chase and gun down witnesses. All we need now are some stylishly shot silhouettes, a few trilbies and long overcoats and a brooding hard-boiled detective. Instead, we get a heavily pregnant police chief whose struggles with morning sickness are as real as her breakthroughs in the murder case she has been assigned. Even the plot, instead of neat little episodes and sharp turns, is a bumbling mix of failures: a botched-up kidnapping, false promises of money, a romp in a cheap motel abruptly leading to a violent thrashing, a money drop ending in an unplanned murder and a ripped jaw, among other incidents of plans going astray.
And then there is the snow. Endless and everywhere, it gives the film its definitive look. It is almost blinding in its starkness in the film’s opening frames as it prepares us for a setting which seems placid: a dull, sleepy little town where nothing much happens. But then the rug of complacency is pulled from beneath our feet and we fall face first into the chaos.
Like the film itself, the snow is deceitful. It lures us in with the promise of calm, until we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of the mayhem even as it quietly swallows up the very money which sets the plot in motion.
Consistently surprising
The Coens seem to invite their viewers to try and predict what they are in for only to thoroughly baffle them.
Take Barton Fink (1991). The eponymous young playwright, after a successful run at Broadway, goes to California to try his luck at Hollywood despite his misgivings about the place. With a premise such as this, one would expect the film to follow the somewhat familiar trajectory of temporary preliminary success followed by inevitable failure and disappointment with possibly a closing statement about the transience of fame in the world of glamour. But this is not that kind of film and the Coens are not that kind of filmmakers. They bring horror into this mix where Barton (a brilliant John Turturro) finds himself almost trapped in a Polanski-esque room as he suffers from writer’s block while his seemingly friendly neighbour turns out to be a serial killer.
Death is as arbitrary as life in the Coens’ world of chance encounters and random acts of fate. In Burn After Reading (2008), the personal trainer who hides in a closet hoping to find clues accidentally ends up dead, just as the CD containing what is believed to be sensitive government information just happens to fall into wrong hands, resulting in a film which is a hilarious cross between a comedy and a conspiracy thriller.
The killings
Since death happens so violently and so often, the brothers also seem to have nurtured a morbid fascination with themes of dismemberment and disposal. There is the severed head packed in a box in Barton Fink and the private eye’s almost disembodied hand that remains nailed by a knife to a window sill in Blood Simple (1984). There’s also the timely garbage barge that carries off the dead as they are tossed off a bridge in The Ladykillers (2004) and of course Fargo’s notorious wood chipper used by one of the hitmen to dispose of his accomplice. Characters in the Coen brothers’ films seem as keen to kill as they are able to deal with the dead.
Memorable characters
Devoid of genre staples, the Coen universe is often a cruel one, peopled with amoral, desperately human characters whose actions are driven by the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in. In this world of no easy categorisations, there are few villains and fewer heroes: an ex-con who steals a baby to fulfil his wife’s recently dashed hopes of becoming a mother (Raising Arizona, 1987). A Jewish professor at the mercy of malicious forces of fate which unfathomably destroy his life as he struggles to keep it together with some occasional help from god and marijuana (A Serious Man, 2009). A talented folk musician in New York in the ’60s whose battles to survive and succeed make him ruthlessly selfish (Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013).
The spinoffs
FX’s television series Fargo, which premiered in 2014, is a clever pastiche of the Coens’ body of work and carries forward some of its central qualities. Set in the past, like most of their films, both seasons of the show are peppered with the all-too-familiar elements: black humour, irony, abrupt narrative turns, emotional distance, the arbitrariness of events and a certain quirkiness of character and plot. Even random alien incursions reminiscent of moments in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) aren’t left out of this odd mix. The TV show is a loving tribute to the original from the opening (false!) declaration to its key players.
Even the wood chipper finds its worthy successor in the suitably gorier meat grinder of the butcher’s shop in Season 2. The show references the Coens’ other films as well. There is Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) who in his capacity for destruction reminds one of the terrifying Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) of No Country for Old Men (2007) while Korean War vet Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman) seems like a nod to the hilariously loud, perpetually railing Walter Sobchak (Coen regular John Goodman) of The Big Lebowski (1998). Even scenes such as the one in Miller’s Crossing (1990) where the erring daughter of the Gerhardt crime family is killed in the woods by her uncle are reminiscent of a similar sequence in the way in which it evokes a sense of vulnerability and pathos.
While all this clever cross-referencing is very Coenesque in its essence, the show’s own ability to deliver the unexpected is also what makes it such an ardent love letter. Fish falling out of the sky following a storm, a woman driving on with a man stuck in her windshield or a town sheriff secretly attempting to create a universal pictorial language are all things that happen in this bizarre and unpredictable universe which ultimately point to the Coens’ uniquely whimsical vision.
The author is a Mumbai-based freelance writer
Things you didn’t know about Coen bros:
Joel and Ethan Coen’s favourite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick
Despite writing the iconic wood chipper scene, the Coens didn't know how to work the machine.
Ethan once tried to explain a missed deadline at Princeton University by saying that he had lost one of his arms during a hunting accident.
Joel saved the money he made by mowing lawns as a kid to buy the brothers’ their first Super-8 camera.
A friend of the Coens, Peter Exline, was an inspiration for The Big Lebowski.
Actress Frances McDormand, who appeared in five Coen films, including Fargo, is married to Joel.
Ethan Coen has written a collection of short stories, Gates of Eden.
This copy has been corrected for a factual error.
