Joel & Ethan Coen
Blood Simple - Sangue Facile

"The world is full of discontented people, because unfortunately no one is happy with what they have"

It is with this narration that the first work of the "terrible brothers" Joel and Ethan Coen opens. With this first work from 1984, the Coens choose to direct a noir with murky hues, set in a Texas where the desolate landscapes, the omnipresent flies, the slowly moving ceiling fans only amplify the sense of oppression and anguish of the plot.

Everything seems to start with the most classic of genre clichés: Marty (Dan Hedaya), a bar owner, is married to Abby (a young Frances McDormand, future wife of Joel and muse of numerous films by the duo), who however has a liaison with Rey (John Getz), an employee of Marty. The latter, an inept and extremely obsessive man, upon learning of the affair from a private investigator (Michael Emmet Walsh), hires the same man to eliminate the couple. From this moment on, the directors enjoy complicating the story a lot, amidst misunderstandings and mistakes.

"Here we are in Texas, and everyone thinks for themselves" the initial voice always says, and it is terribly true as the characters are closed in an almost absolute lack of communication, all stubbornly interpreting facts solely in the light of their own logic, ignoring the rest, none of them can understand the course of events and it is only the spectator who has an overview (except for the private investigator when it's already too late for him). One of the themes most dear to the two directors is the impossibility for people to change, to suddenly become something else without creating disasters, which inevitably makes them losers (a theme that underpins almost all of the duo's future films): the investigator who improvises as a killer does so with superficiality, leaving clues everywhere and dragging himself and the other characters into a senseless spiral of violence, completely at the mercy of chaos and events.

The grotesque of the situations reigns supreme to the point of making us think that the two brothers might have taken us all for a ride: where is the police in this murky story full of corpses? Why would a bartender carry a shovel in the trunk of his car? Who would give their wife a gun for their anniversary? The typical genre stereotypes are turned upside down, the bad-husband seems almost repentant, the killer is not so infallible and is beaten by a femme fatale not so fatale. The investigator's liberating final laugh almost makes us lean towards this interpretation.

From a stylistic point of view, the Coens work by subtraction: dialogues reduced to the bone, almost entirely absent music (always entrusted to Carter Burnwell in every other film of the duo), instead, the background is the buzzing of the fan blades, the echoing of threatening footsteps or the metallic scraping of a shovel on asphalt, and where music is present, it contrasts with the tension of the scenes, such as in the sequence where a corpse is buried to the background of a festive Mexican mariachi song. Already full of flashes of class, the direction features elegant tracking shots alternating with quick shots to highlight the most important plot details.

Of course, not everything is perfect, the pace is too slow at some points (even the actors seem to move in slow motion, Rey particularly seems struck by a profound catalepsy), there are some plot contrivances, but the film is a small gem of independent cinema of the '80s, and it contains in its essence many elements that will be revisited by the two directors both thematically and environmentally, from the desolate lands of "No Country for Old Men" to the nighttime roads where murders are committed in the dark, as happens in "Fargo". Joel & Ethan's first film oozes pessimism and lack of hope in humankind, but ultimately who cares, it's a start on the right foot.

SCORE = 7