What came first, the hen or the egg? It’s not like I ponder over this extremely annoying question everyday. But for me, there has always been something fascinating about beginnings. How does life evolve, how do people build up a business and how does an artist start a new painting? When it comes to film, it is always interesting to look back at a director’s first – often shaky – steps with a camera on her/his shoulders. In this feature, I will look back at a certain director’s first film every month.
The Coen brothers are a curious couple of directors. Their film titles have a familiarity to them after pop culture’s mouth has repeated them over and over. Most of them, anyway. Although I have only seen four Coen brother movies so far (including this one), looking at their filmography, ‘The Hudsucker Proxy‘, ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There‘ and ‘The Ladykillers‘ intrigue me far more than others – because I have never heard of them. ‘Blood Simple‘ was a little different though, more like a faint echo of something I thought I had heard a few times.
The story is dark – noir, to be precise: Abby (Frances McDormand) cheats on her husband, barowner Julian (Dan Hedaya) with bartender Ray (John Getz). When Julian finds out about the affair, he hires a private detective to assassinate both Abby and Ray. However, things get much messier and bloodier than initially expected by anyone.
As a directorial debut, Blood Simple is a very confident and somewhat ballsy film. It has Texas written all over it in blood-smeared letters and the tension in its last third is heavily sweat-inducing. It’s not so much about the story in this Coen-ish creation- because let’s be honest, this story is pretty boring on paper. Instead, the directing duo demonstrates how you can make the simplest thing (like this story) interesting by showing it in a certain way. Many scenes are stretched out way beyond a length that other directors would have given them, but that’s what makes it interesting. You experience the growing despair of the characters and can truly appreciate the ever-growing tension of the situation.
Most often, the scenes even work without much (or any) dialogue. Long stares say more than the most exquisitely written Texanian dialogue (because this is not Twilight). If the characters do get anything to say, it doesn’t even make much sense – all for the better. One of the most memorable scenes of the movie is when Ray comes back home to Abby after a crucial event in the movie’s plot and is unable to make much more than incoherent gibberish come out of his mouth. Her quiet concernedness serves as a wonderful counterpart to his raging madness. Since we’re already at it: the actors in this movie are fantastic. I hadn’t consciously seen Frances McDormand in anything before but she knocked it out of the park in this one. It took me a while to get used to her face – and John Getz’s for that matter – but the more I looked at her, the more I could appreciate her uncommon, natural beauty. It seemed a little odd for her to be married to someone like Dan Hedaya, but then again she did leave him for another man.
My mixed feelings towards The Big Lebowski had kept me from calling myself a Coen brothers aficionado for a long time, but with Blood Simple, they have cracked my limit of three personal hits. Consider me a fan.
