Saturday 28 June 2008

Blood Simple [1984]


Blood Simple was the movie that introduced the film aficionados to the genius and unpredictability of the Coen brothers, and their dangerously captivating world – a dark, murky place where all rules of normality have gone completely haywire, and where things have a splendid knack of going horribly wrong at the slightest opportunity. A neonoir, with an almost lazy yet beautifully paced plot– a Coens’ speciality – filled with all their quirkiness, bizarre morality plays, ironies, and of course a copious amount of betrayal, double and triple dealings, and murders. The trivial tale of a husband hiring a private eye to murder his wife who is cheating on him, turns out to be a delicious treatise on the famous Murphy’s Law – if things can go wrong, they will. The movie, as in all their subsequent films, is littered with a great cast of character actors from the slippery and unscrupulous private eye to the opportunist wife cum quasi-femme fatale to the cuckolded and burning-for-revenge husband. [This happens to be my 50th film review. Way to go]









Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Genre: Post-Noir/Crime Thriller/Private Eye
Language: English
Country: US

3 comments:

Rick Olson said...

Nice capsule review of a good flick. For me, "Blood Simple" showed the promise of the Coens, realized fully in their later films.

Anonymous said...

P.S. The Coens are much better than those Cohans!

Shubhajit said...

I agree with you on that! Blood Simple showed a hell lot of promise, which of course the Cohans (read Coens) have fulfilled numerous times over. In fact, as an individual film, this showed maturity & audacity way beyond their experience at the time of its making.