Blood Simple
Today, Loris asked me to write this blog posting today and something smart on top of it. If I had not put “write blog posting on Blood Simple” onto the top of my to-do list today, I would normally have said that these two requirements do not mesh well. But I will give it a try so here we are. (Concerning the top of my to-do list you might be wondering what I have been doing all day, well somehow I worked some, did some homework, took a nap, watched TV shows, danced and wrote thank you notes. I love thank you notes.)
In the conversation, rule 34 also came up. So, considering that “film noir” exists, it’s probably conceivable to turn a thriller into porn. I wonder how often that actually happens – it’s a very specific esthetic, but it’s cheap to do (film noirs were cheap, back in the day) and your typical film noir has plenty of male-female interactions which could be re-written into full-blown sex scenes. That brought us to the question as to how “Blood Simple” is a film noir. Certainly there aren’t that many gangsters nor detectives in the film, and you cannot quite count a private detective whose incapability is almost funny. Frances McDormand is so, so cute in the film but she is far from being a femme fatale character. Nevertheless, I have doubted a single second that this is a film noir (though, not being black-and-white nor from the 40-50s, technically I probably have to say “neo-noir”); the premise of the film is the attempted murder because some wife had a new guy, and practically everything else in the film happens as a consequence to this premise (i.e. because of the woman), but also because of misunderstandings between the characters. The characters cannot trust each other, and that becomes the reason for their downfall. Even without being a traditional femme fatale, two out of three men in the film act because of their love for Abby.
One of the criticism against “A woman, a gun and a noodle soup”, Zhang Yimou’s quasi-remake of “Blood Simple”, consisted in the assertion that Zhang does not care about his characters in the film. That would make it an entirely different film from “Blood Simple” because I think the Coens really cared for these characters here. The way Abby is portrayed as weak, innocent-looking and afraid yet brave when looking into the eye of death, Ray as the guy in love who doesn’t quite know what to do but is smart in a similar way to the Dude since just looking at those fake photos he understood qhat happened and finally Morty as the jealous, painstricken man. Since I expected Frances McDormand to be giving a great performance and was happy to see her in such an important role again, I was most impressed by the character of Morty. Certainly his jealous anger seems run-of-the-mill but I have not seen such an emotional portrayal of such a man for quite awhile and the camera work with its close-ups of Morty certainly helps.
Camera work is definitely what makes “Blood Simple” so great. People say “oh it’s pretty good for a first movie” so often, but when it comes to the art of film-making, I think that the Coens definitely have mastered it already. The way the story is told, with the audience always one step ahead of the characters, the suspense created by the fact that all these misunderstandings between them creates an incredible sense of danger, heightened by the fact that you never really know who is actually dead or not – it takes a great filmmaker to be able to produce something like this, first film or not.
But then again, there are these kinds of films that you think are great in every aspect but you cannot quite relate to them, especially with something as down-to-earth as “Blood Simple” which differs from a typical Coen film in how it does not try to inspire some intellectual meaning into a huge cast full of freak of natures, but depicts comparably normal people in an admittedly quite murderous conflict. Despite my great impression with Dan Hedaya as Morty, I was not really able to feel with the characters, whereas I strangely could with “Barton Fink”. This is even more impressive considering that Barton Fink was quite a wimp, heh. It’s the kind of story which I thought was very entertaining while it lasted, and I certainly will remember the enjoyment, but there isn’t much more to that. Most of all, “Blood Simple” stands as an example for well-made films with a well-told story, definitely a must-see even if it’s not one of my personal favorites.
I have an incredible craving for a Lubitsch comedy now, but sadly I don’t have any available. I might decide to go for another Hollywood comedy, but then I also discovered another random film I want to see, namely “The Crush” with a 15 year old Alicia Silverstone. It look so randomly interesting?