Thursday

A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers' second film since No Country for Old Men. For some reason, that movie serves as a new landmark in their career, and their films are now often billed as 'from the directors of No Country for Old Men'. This is strange since that movie is atypical to their career, and the two that have followed are more obviously Coenesc (I may have invented this word). A Serious Man is not as funny as Burn After Reading, but this is perhaps because its humour is subtler and darker. There is definitely more substance here, but it is a harder film to like immediately. Both the beginning sequence and the ending left me confused, but whilst the latter was intriguing, the former seemed irrelevant. They also relied on the trick dream sequence a bit too much throughout (where what is happening you think real until the character wakes up screaming). Nonetheless, the small touches were so brilliantly conceived and carried out, loaded with innuendo and the possibility of violence, that I couldn't help but like this film. I have one quibble which I always do with period films - why does everything look so new? Were people in the past a lot cleaner and tidier than us? I can't believe so.