Coen & Coen: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

If the current proliferation of period pieces has taught us anything, it’s that nostalgia is an orientation towards the future as much as towards the past – over the last few years, we’ve been continually presented with films and television series that head to the past to recover lost dreams of the future, or to restore some hope in the future. In their third period drama in nearly as many years, the Coens crystallise this moment, in a loose, skeletal evocation of a few months in the life of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a folk singer trying to make a name for himself in early 1960s Greenwich Village. Although it’s impossible to think of a milieu that’s been more mythologised as a crucible for futurity, for an entire decade of awakening, the Coens choose to play it a different way. For the most part, there’s no effort to frame Llewyn as a cipher for some singer who subsequently made it big, no contact with any kind of mythical folk community, no warmth, no fraternity – just a cocoon of utter isolation that only intensifies when he’s performing, making it impossible for him, and us, to formulate things even a day in advance, let alone to envisage the vast new morning that would emerge by the end of the decade. In other directors’ hands, that might play as wry revisionism, but there’s a visionary register here that offsets that, culminating with a road trip to Chicago that’s at least as indebted to the silent sequence in Sullivan’s Travels as O Brother, Where Are Thou? – there’s the same quiet warping of time, the same inchoate recourse to images of almost unbearable pregnancy and beauty that suggest how it might look to see the future suddenly appearing, warping through an extended, indefinite present like the first individual take on a perennial folk song. It’s a vision that’s only partly offered to Davis, just as it’s only partly offered to us, but that’s what makes the film powerful – it suggests that periods of vast futurity are often preceded by periods of no futurity; in the Coens’ hands, the late 60s only awakened because people like Davis spent the early 60s collectively wresting a sense of the future from nothing, from one of the coldest New York winters on record, even or especially when they weren’t aware of it. In that sense, it’s a period drama about the present – the rhythms of couch-surfing and apartment-hopping aren’t that different from, say, those of Frances Ha – or, better still, a period drama about the future, a guide for living through one too many millennial mornings without a future; its bleary-eyed, half-awakened streetscapes are only momentarily the 60s, and then completely, disarmingly, our own.