The French love being caressed clockwise

Rating: 8/10 (7 December 2013)

Inspired from Dave Van Ronk, and his memoirs of course, that folk singer who was born in 1936 and died in 2002. He worked as a guitarist with many other folk singers but also had his own career. And we can trust the Coen brothers to make it an attractive nostalgic bleak story in which they settle some accounts though this part is becoming some kind of an inside joke.
An inside joke of course the union exploitation of workers on the seafront of New York, but that sounds passé and looks obsolete. Union control and tyranny has been a constant motto in the USA and many films have shown it, over and over again, but it became trendy at least thirty years ago to show over and over again too how some have said, "Enough is enough" and have pushed back that tyranny and brought unions back to what they are supposed to do: to protects workers and not to defend the privileges of those who are unionized, and buying a union card is nothing but one form of corruption in western countries, unionized if not syndicated corruption.
In the same way accounts are settled concerning producers in the music field, be they label managers, artistic agents or club and bar owners of any kind you can imagine. The art world is a hard world, easy shift of words but true enough and if you want to succeed, talent is not enough, desire and will power are not enough, good music and good lyrics are not enough. You need something else, something more: persistence, stubbornness, one-pointed-ness, serenity and serendipity, and even so you will need a lot of flexibility and resilience. And as the Van Ronk sung in one song of his "Cocaine is for horses, not for men!" but flexibility is for men and horses are anything but flexible. If you have the power of a horse, change professions and forget about the stage.
The film gives such a bleak description of that profession, how these artists are exploited by everyone and how they are reduced to go begging for the help and charity of friends and acquaintances. That's pathetic. Because we are living in another world, and those 1960s are so far away, so uninteresting today, so Martian in spirit and Lunar in mind, outlandish, out-spacey, like a black hole in our recent history, when everything was nothing but permanently apocalyptic.
The Coen brothers are just clean and polite about it and avoid everyday problems like clogged bathrooms and stuffed toilets, but they cannot avoid the friendly couple with the wife building the career of the couple on her flexible sexuality, and the husband building the same career of the same couple on his just equally flexible sexuality with producers who prefer boys. Bleak I am telling you. And the wife will have some of the friends of the couple pay for the abortions by making them believe they are the fathers with some silly aggressive joke on having to wear double condoms next time.
No surprise that the French public loves the films and that Amazon.fr has the French dubbed DVD already for pre-order on their site whereas the English version ,is not available on other Amazon sites. The Coen Brothers are becoming the doppelgangers of Woody Allen in all possible ways. The French public is not very big but it is faithful and gullible. That's the type of film that will enchant them with some pleasure because it is bleak without being dirty, anti-American without being jingoistic, anti-capitalist without being communistic. In other words it will satisfy their desire to attack this modern world and at the same time it will target and hit off the point, which means it will let them go on enjoying their decadent blind self-satisfaction. The brothers even play the "pulp fiction" trick of starting the film with the last scene or finally developing to the end the first scene only at the very last moment of the film.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU