Drive-Away Dolls, Fargo season 5, LaRoy… Isn't the nonsense over yet?

The Coen brothers' cinema still continues to be emulated.

This article was originally published in the new number of First (n°550 with Ghostbusters: The Ice Menace In front page). We're sharing it online, now that Drive Away Dolls was released in cinemas.

Cinema weather update: the release of a handful of films and series “a la Coen brothers” (Or “coeneries”as they are affectionately called) is it enough to justify a page “microclimate” in the news? After all, films inspired by the neo-noir and absurdist-minimalist style of Joel And Ethan, we see some flowering all the time, in all latitudes. It has become a genre in itself, and has been for a long time. Forty years to be exact: we know this because a 4K anniversary edition of their inaugural masterpiece has just been published by Criterion Blood Simplethe film which laid the foundations of their grammar in 1984.

The myth of brothers was born there: one directed, the other produced, there were two of them and yet they spoke with one and the same voice. Their style would soon spread everywhere. Since they separated (after The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in 2018), we thought that their solo careers would finally allow us to better know who was who between Joel and Ethan. The first filmed a story of love and murder with Frances McDormand (very Blood Simpletherefore), but adapted from Shakespeare, for a change (The Tragedy of Macbeth). The second today attempts to reproduce the imposed figures of coenism in the lesbian road movie Drive Away Dolls. But everything (the cartoon filming, the hillbilly accents, the stupid characters, etc.) seems old-fashioned and laborious. As if Ethan no longer knew how to speak the Coen.

“Funny fun” trailer for Drive-Away Dolls by Ethan Coen, with Margaret Qualley, Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon

The fact that a bad Coen comes out in the cinema is not in itself very serious, it will not be the first time. What is more so is that the disaster Drive Away Dolls comes shortly after the end of the fifth season of Fargothe TV anthology inspired by the Coenian masterpiece released in 1996. After a season 4 in the form of a dead end, exhausting, saturated with characters and signature effects, Noah Hawley had the good idea to return to the essence of Fargore-examining the original film with a magnifying glass to question a sort of blind spot (the character of the kidnapped woman from William H. Macy), from which to set off again to embroider 10 hours of abundant television, functioning as a snapshot of an America in full post-Trump secessionist delirium – proof that the Coenian devices, as refined as they are, are perhaps in reality inexhaustible.

What also suggests LaRoyfirst feature of Shane AtkinsonGrand Prix of the last Deauville festival in theaters on April 17, about a Texan cuckold without quality, who will find himself caught in a murderous spiral with no return… A neo-Blood Simple, yet another, by a gifted beginner who clearly took the Coen as his first language in film school. How do Joel and Ethan react to the artistic excitement of their offspring? And at the crash of Drive Away Dolls at the US box office? Imagine that they have just announced that they were going to reform their duo. With a movie “in the vein of Blood Simple » ! A return to basics to relearn how to speak their mother tongue. Or brotherly, in this case.

The Coen brothers are going to make a very gory horror film