Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

I can't say that I'm the Coen brothers' biggest fan. For me, some of their films are magnificent, others ok and a few are positively bad. Inside Llewyn Davis did not sound that exciting when I skimmed through a short synopsis of the story. Greenwich village, folk singers, a young struggling artist, Bob fucking Dylan. A boooring period piece about pompous folks with beards or ugly hairdos donned by Justin Timberlake, I thought. Well, my interest was not sparked, at all. In any case, I ventured out to the cinema and planted myself on the comfy chair and found myself hugely enjoying the film for its wacky humor and its slightly elusive story. This was not at all the quasi-bio pic I half-excepted to sit/suffer through. Instead of making a movie about Bod Dylan's Greenwich village, the Coen brothers create the image of the world of folk music from a freshly irreverent and goofy angle - with tons of details related to the times in which the film is set, the early 60's. There's a lot of music and performances of music here and many of these moments turn out to be heart-wrenching and otherworldly silly at the same time - a combination to be cherished. This is not satire in an ordinary sense, however; the film felt melancholy and full of bewilderment. One could even say that the general atmosphere is gloomy with its main characters' vain and bumbling aspiration explored with no hints of consoling sentimentality. The main character, Llewyn, is an unfortunate lad living on his friends' couches. Most of all he'd like to be a professional singer - with integrity - or at least a musician eking out a little money somehow. He signs up for perfoming at the local folk club but always ends up offending somebody. It's the guy who just can't shut up. He offers his services as a background musician on a corny track about space. He tries and tries and he even travels to meet a big-time executive. But well nothing much comes out of it.

So are the Coen brothers' leading us into yet one more tale about the young and troubled artist for whom the world has no appreciation and provides no solace? Not quite - and happily so. The intention rather seems to be to poke fun of the idea of the conflicts of the Artist and the parameters of that conflict. At times I feared that one of the storylines would turn into a sexist trope: Llewelyn's girlfriend - one of them - is pregnant and he has to deal with it. We get the feeling that he's been in this situation before and that what he really wants is just that the nagging girlfriend is less trouble. But what I think happens here is that it is this entire situation that is ironically put in perspective and that we thus are not at all encouraged to take the perspective of looking at 'nagging girlfriends' who interfere with creative folks' lives. Just to mention one quote: “Everything you touch turns to shit, like King Midas’s idiot brother.”

It would not make sense to describe the progression of the film. This is not the kind of movie that goes from a to b to c evoking a familiar sequence of events. As I said, Inside Llewyn Davis leans towards the elusive and what happens here seems to have a thousand meanings, or none at all. Most things seem to stem from a damned cat. I rarely laught out loud when watching movies or when going to the cinema. Here, I actually constantly felt on the verge of really cracking up. The genius of the film is that most of the time I was not at all sure about what was so funny. A cavernous-looking office, a minor record company, with an ancient woman writing on a type-writer while sternly throwing out some words of advice? Well, it was funny.