If not we, then the cat

“Hang me, oh, hang me,” the Folk-singer Lewin Davis appeals from the stage in the dank in November 1961. The heavenly addressee of the prayer will not slow down with the answer: having finished the performance, Lewin will go out into the street and receive the kidneys from a stranger with a goer and intonations of the righteous. The impartial clarity of the general plan, with which the Cohen brothers remove the scene of this punishment, will hint: he deserved.

What exactly deserved, it should become clear in the next one and a half hours. Here is a brief summary of the previous beating of the week from Lewin Davis: one paid abortion-and one canceled, wanderings between studios, half-empty bars and other people's sofas, an absurd sortie in Chicago in the company-heroine and a fatty-vilitary, an infinite many offenses and insults-caused by Davis, but more often still inflicted by him. Most - in the company of a red cat with an unclear (for the time being) in a name.

All this, however, in the new film of the Cohen brothers is desperately - and, of course, by the will of the authors - does not want to form a plot. If "Oh, where are you, brother?" He was the Cohen “Odyssey” (neither Joel Homer was read), then “inside Lewin Davis” - already, of course, “Ulysses” (taking into account the fact that no one was discovered here either). Smwing out of one hassle in order to immediately plunge into another (the operator Delbonnel literally drowns a frame in a haze), Davis spends days in search of not so much success (the difficult relations of a talented but non-communal hero are more or less devoted to all the reviews of the film), but at least a slightly intelligible, logical embroidery of his own life-and precisely This, like Leopold Bloom, suffers the most important failures. “Inside Lewin Davis” is an hour and a half of oppressive expectation, the promise that the heavens will suddenly notice a wanderer with a guitar and enter it not even in history (musical, first of all), but in history, at least some plot. But the promise is never fulfilled-neither the folk star will come out of Davis, nor the sailor, nor the lover, nor the father, and around the turns of his Road-Odissey, nothing but new turns. The only story that the hero will still be stuck into is a random incident with kidneys broken into the gateway. The highest humor is still very cynical.

“Inside Lewin Davis” is perhaps the most ambitious Cohen film. Like Davis himself, who consciously evokes divine fire, but does not understand that only a podzhopnik deserves, Coenes challenged the God of the Hollywood narrative - the logic of the central conflict, according to which the hero motivated by an existential goal should somehow embody his ill -pound desires in practical actions and encounter their deep consequences. And, unlike their hero, they achieve success. In the absence of genuine drama (and the degree of the tragedy of Davis, doomed to look at how fame overtakes others, is ridiculous) their film becomes the ideal X -ray picture of human nature. Everyone who finds himself in the way of the threatening title hero, from a friend who has become pregnant from him to a God-like wise producer from Chicago (“I would advise you to engage in a reunification of a duet”), in comparison with him, it is not only emphasized rational-but also in his rationality, faith in a normal, reasonably stupid, unbearably stupid. But it is precisely this stupidity, according to the Coans, that it turns out that makes us people - while Davis will dissolve in the fog of an empty gateway, will bring another great self -proclaimed fool to the frame with an idiotic wind . And leave the genuine Odyssey (with a tie, intrigue, climax, a happy ending and a well -deserved return), leave the cat. Still, it is his name here is Ulysses.