dimanche 14 février 2010

A Serious Man

Accept the mystery !

I saw A Serious Man yesterday and it's simply excellent!

It's one of the best films the very talented Brother Coens(or Coen Brothers), two of the greatest filmakers of all time, ever made. It's cleverly written (they'd better win the award of best scenario!), cerebral, beautifully shot, well-played and, although it sort of belongs to the film noir genre, it is also very funny (the sequence telling the story of the goys' teeth is hilarious).

The opening sequence is brilliant and a daring prologue. Like a Jewish tale meant to Enlighten, it takes place in the old Eastern Europe (probably a shtetl from the 19th century)so many American Jews came from, and all the dialogues are in Yiddish.

Then we find ourselves in the 60's and follow Larry Gopnik and his family in a Minneapolis' suburb. The brothers Coens grew up in such environment; their father was a college teacher like Larry, and they had to go to Hebrew School like the young characters in the film while they couldn't care less about religion and were rather into pop culture and Jefferson Plane's songs, so it's the most autobiographical movie in their work, but there's much more in this film than just an acid portrait of the American Jewish families and community in the Midwest. In a way their childhood is like a dibbouk that came back to haunt their film, but like the macabre opening scene in the shtetl, the Coens' background gives us keys to parse their work.

In the movie, Larry Gopnik's life (both personal and professional) is slowly turning into a nightmare, just falling apart, and there's nobody to support him, so he visits three rabbis in an increasingly vain attempt to find answers and solve his crisis. His journey is therefore divided in three acts, each separeted by a black screen...which is quite nihilistic but fits in the Coens' world!

The film opens with a quote from rabbi Rashi (a medieval French rabbi whose exegesis work I've come to know thanks to Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost!): "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you".

Also, Larry, being a Quantum Physics teacher, briefly reminds us, through two of his lectures (one is a dream sequence though) of Shrödinger's Cat and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that both find many echoes in the rest of the movie. But it's a Korean student (who tries to bribe Larry to change a F into a C so he would pass!) who sums it up when saying "accept the mystery", a true rabbinic line, which was smart and interesting to put in this morally-challenged Asian mouth (but as rabbi Nachtner suggested through the dentist' story sometimes there are important messages in goys' mouth!)!

It isn't only a Jewish precept in order to be a "serious man" that would live his life without questioning Hashem's plan, it is something that defines the Coens' art and the reason I love their films (well, most of them): they don't feel the need to explain everything to the audience, to provide answers. Perhaps the matter of being "a serious man" has less to do with the characters in the film, and more with the viewers.

I am not a Jew, but cinema is my religion, and the Coens can be my storytelling rabbis any time!