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I don't know, today I was observing this famous German poet and his audience. He enters, sits down, doesn't look at anyone, flicks through his papers. Pink shirt under a gray cardigan. Hair so slicked to the side it looks like a cow licked his skull. He prepares two glasses of water and places them on a shelf behind him. He drinks one, refills it, and places it back on the shelf. He doesn't drink it. It reminds me of the scene with the overly annoying father in "Dead Poets Society" and when, before getting into bed, he adjusts his slippers for the next morning. Okay, he's a psychopath, a serious person, that's what I thought the first time I saw that scene and this is what I think about the glass being refilled. The presenter says that his poetry is a unification of tradition, philosophy, research, and signs of the past. I tell myself that okay, if his poetry is a unification of tradition, philosophy, research, and signs of the past he must be gay too. At the first word, he's betrayed by his forearm that swings freely while the rest of his arm stays tied to his torso. But what kind of poetry could there ever be in a man who prepares a glass of water to drink it thirty minutes later? It must surely be poetry that is a unification of tradition, philosophy, research, and signs of the past, but it will also be empty poetry, smelling of cyclamen. Sad constipation. Stuff for people who strive to be serious, I tell myself while thinking I must remember the name of this guy to be sure not to read him even by mistake. I walk out anyway. I stand up and walk out. He says something, something like am I so boring?, I don't laugh, someone does. I exit into the darkness of Via Benedetto Croce, people have turned into industrious ants, all in search of gifts as if they were crumbs of bread, these gifts remind me of a Bukowski story where he narrated and boasted, as usual, of his filthy deeds. He said he would leave for these readings, full of idiots, that he hated. He went, he said, only because they gave him free drinks. There.
Larry Gopnik, almost a physics professor, Jewish, is a serious man. He's so morbidly serious that he has his own ethics and even a certain consistency to pursue. He is a serious person, so serious that he makes the surrounding world something alien and distant, so distant that all those revolving around him - the wife, the wife's lover, the children who take money from his wallet (one to buy some marijuana, the other to get a nose job), the retarded brother, rabbis, Asian students, and their parents - are all except serious. They all drift around the world. Not him, he has a trajectory and a path to follow.
He, Larry Gopnik, indulges in equations and useless numbers; the son listens to Jefferson Airplane with headphones on in class. This kid with horrible red hair puts twenty dollars in the radio case, twenty dollars stolen from his sister who had stolen them from their father. The teacher catches him, confiscates the radio, and consequently the twenty dollars he needed to pay for his marijuana. The other one, the serious man, Larry Gopnik, returns to his office. An Asian boy tells him that "F: very bad", that "F: very difficult to study". He proposes to the serious man, Larry Gopnik, to retake the test and he, being a serious man, replies no, saying it wouldn't be fair to the classmates. Then the student leaves and leaves an envelope on the desk. Only later, the serious man, will notice the envelope containing several hundred-dollar bills. From here, from this subplot that will be placed in the background, the story begins. A tangle of problems and absurd situations with many people who have nothing serious about them. Actually, it's more or less a human case trade fair, one for each species, almost a Noah's Ark. No, Moses's ark.
There's nothing to do about it: the Coen Brothers, besides being a couple of jokers with so much fuel on board, are still the Coen Brothers. The script is the same: human case + money + tangle of situations + a certain morality. Only this time they don't forget to throw in a considerable slice of their lives. The film, shot in Minneapolis, their hometown - and at times, for the coldness and persistence of certain close-ups, it reminds of Fargo. As if to say that if you shoot a film around those parts that's how it should be done -, is a mockery, besides people who take themselves too seriously, of Jewish orthodoxy. No one is saved, after all, and these geniuses from one film a year synthesize their entire filmography in "A Serious Man," like the motto, the slogan that is underneath and before everything else.
And how does it end? It ends in a biblical way. The son learns from the father and the father learns from the son, then God arrives to put an end with his Old Testament cruelty to this microcosm of circumcised sinners.
But now I don't remember what the first paragraph has to do with the film. I'll let you know later. Oh, yes. A friend of mine once told me: can a conscious man perhaps have the slightest self-respect?
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