This review contains spoliers
I really enjoyed this. Every scene is beautifully made. The Coen Brothers have an amazing knack of making very slow movies which are never boring. In this one the music comes centre-stage, and it sounds good.
In the first scene of the movie Llewyn gets punched outside a nightclub, and in the second scene he wakes up on a friend's couch. At the time it looks like that's the very next morning, but by the end of the movie you realise that that second scene actually takes place a week earlier, and most of the movie is showing that week leading up to being punched. At the time this comes as a bit of a surprise, and it took me a minute to realise what's going on. Normally in a film when you get shown the ending first something massive happens in that scene (usually the main character dying), so that you realise that the next scene must be taking place in the past. Here though, there's no clue that's what's going on. It's a clever device that makes me want to see the movie again straight away just to work out the chronology.
I think the idea of looping back to the start is that he's made no progress. It's a sort of Groundhog Week; a Road Movie with no destination. He tried to go to Chicago, he tried to rejoin the navy, but he didn't get anywhere. As Llewyn says about his music "If it's never new and it doesn't get old, it's a folk song". But there are a few signs he's moved on - he manages to stop the cat getting out the door the second time, and after it's cut short twice we finally get to hear him play his old partner's song all the way through at the end.
Oscar Isaak is good as Llewyn Davis. It's a tough character, as he's got to be both charismatic and lazy, a bit like The Dude in The Big Lebowski. You feel for him as he keeps getting given opportunities, and keeps on throwing them away. The surrounding cast is much more colourful, and I'd even say the normally very good Carey Mulligan is a bit over the top.
The ginger cat Ulysses looks very handsome, and there's some very atmospheric scenes in the car where characters are drifting in and out of sleep on the way to Chicago and back. Although the film is always exciting by the end you do feel the fatigue of Llewyn, and this probably isn't a good movie to watch if you're very tired.
Llewyn's folk songs are good, and the pacing of the movie allows you to hear them all the way through. Each of his songs describes his mood, especially when he has an audition and rejects commercial music by doing a wilfully obscure song about Henry the Eighth. "There's no money in it", says producer F. Murray Abraham, and I think he's right. The folk songs from other artists are much worse, not sure if they're meant to be deliberately bad or not.
Overall, a fantastic film, and I look forward to enjoying it again.
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