Joel & Ethan Coen
Blood Simple

“Head down Ricardo Reis followed them, certainly due to the shame of walking like this with nothing, hands in his pockets”.
The sentence continues, but the letters disappear: they get buried somewhere up there between the cerebellum and the forehead. The head, mine, sways while I read it once again, for the umpteenth time. The sentence rolls dangerously, like a ship in the grip of a long wave; then it stumbles on the blankets before finally crashing onto the hard floor, breaking and scattering like pieces of a disordered puzzle just opened. On the wood: “Effect-of-walking-head-nothing-Ricardo-them-followed-hands-in-pocket-shame…”.
I painstakingly reassemble the sentence: like a craftsman trying to fix some delicate tool and I continue for a while, but soon I realize I'm skimming through words that become bland, insulting and trivializing Saramago's great writing. Better to close it and move on to something else today, I tell myself as I put down the book. Definitely.

Texas. It's a nice name, don't you think? Short, but sharp with that ending that embodies the hiss of a rattlesnake. It's full of them, Texas. A dangerous place, therefore, where one gives their wife a pearl-handled gun: pearls before swine, for her who doesn't even know how to use it. Down here everyone thinks only of themselves. Yeah, you can't trust many people because there's so much empty space and people drive around with a shovel in the trunk of the car. As if to say: you never know.

Don't even trust them, the directors: although it's their first feature film, they give us 90 minutes full of phosphorus-rich and visually satisfying points. The only thing that has aged badly in “Blood Simple” is the fashion of the terrible '80s clothes and hair. Because otherwise, this fake noir/thriller has little to envy from “Fargo”, including the actors, among whom the striking McDormand stands out, rehearsing for the well-deserved '96 statuette.

These are small things, but they stick in the mind. In flames. Like those initial wipers in the total darkness of a sinister night that are perfectly in time with the soundtrack. Slow shots that continuously reference each other as the film progresses. Obsessedly slow are the camera movements like the dialogues and the almost geriatric movements of the actors. Zoom-ins on the meticulous details of a dizzying photography. An essential but poignant soundtrack, with a few ivory keys placed there, right at the perfect moment. In moments of tension, it disappears in favor of exaggerated and sharp noises of a boot on wood, a furtive hand rummaging in a bag, the splash of a drop of blood falling, and the macabre, unsettling rattle of a shovel inexorably approaching, slowly hitting the asphalt. Light to depict good and shadow to personify evil.

These tiny things put together are pleasing and make the film view so rewarding that you almost don't realize that the two brothers are taking us for a ride with this story without real foundations.

The police do not exist, yet there is loud shooting. A killer roams around the house and she, the victim, locks herself in the bathroom. But she does it calmly. Blatant pieces of evidence left everywhere by supposed professionals like endless breadcrumbs of Tom Thumb. Pigeons could feast, following them for weeks, moving that damn neck, fat and happy. The Coens are so good that we almost don't see the gross and sequential mistakes of the four main characters that make their roles increasingly absurd, impossible, stereotyped, and blatantly false, which they perform with extreme skill. People die due to misunderstandings, by mistake. Fucking easy blood, with a big and bitter laugh as the epilogue before the end credits.

Black humor for a classy debut, alas little known. And what a poster!

ilfreddo