Cinema Ethan, the youngest of the Coen brothers, leaves the cinema
Joel and Ethan Coen officially debuted with
Easy Blood
(1984), but they had been making home movies together since they ran around a Minnesota suburb, that
orthodox Jewish environment
they reflected in
A Serious Guy
(2009). They seemed inseparable, almost Siamese. And yet
Macbeth
, which opens on AppleTV and in select theaters on January 12 with a view to the Oscars, is
the first solo adventure for Joel
, the
67-year-old oldest of the Coens.
Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, the director's wife, this new version of William Shakespeare's play so many times taken to the movies,
teleports us to the movie clubs of the 70s
. Filmed in hypnotic black and white, and in an almost square format, it refers both to expressionism and to adaptations of the classic shot by Orson Welles or Akira Kurosawa. The Coen version follows the original text, albeit
in a refined key, as minimalist as the decorated nudes
of a production entirely shot in the studio, as sophisticated as ostentatious papier-mache. This
Macbeth
So theatrical also has something of a paradox, since the Coens separated because Ethan wanted to recover his career as a playwright and theater director, which he reactivated with the premiere of
A play is a poem
in a pre-pandemic Los Angeles.
The first rash conclusions we could jump to are that Ethan is the funny brother, and that
Frances McDormand is the Yoko Ono of the band
. The veteran actress, who received her first Oscar for
Fargo
(1996), was already Lady Macbeth on the stage five years ago, an experience of which she was half happy and perhaps possessed by that black lady who convinced her husband to kill the King, played by Irishman Brendan Gleeson in the film.
Joel says he misses Ethan, but when he looked where he was, there he had Frances
, producing her husband for the first time.
And what about Ethan being the funny one?
The Coens' bizarre humor is conspicuously absent
from
Macbeth
. Do not expect the laughter of
The Big Lebowski
(1998), nor a dissonant element like the saucepan hairstyle, a la prince de Beukelaer, by Javier Bardem in the terrifying
No Country for Old Men
(1990). The most disturbing factor here are
those three witches who are embodied by an unforgettable contortionist Kathryn Hunter
. Among the novelties, more than Denzel Washington's skin - he is not the first black Macbeth, and he was already in
Much ado
about nothing in 1993 -, is the age of the couple. If Marion Cotillard buried a dead baby in the
Macbeth
From Justin Kurzel (2015), McDormand is a post-menopausal Lady Macbeth, and that's a sign of the times too.
Some will wonder if another
Macbeth
was needed , no matter how impressive this one, and the question answers itself: there are still
plenty of neo-tyrants
eager to perpetuate themselves in power, although it is true that it is difficult to imagine them tragic and gnawed by remorse.
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