Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Inside Llewyn Davis
2013 · Joel Coen · Inside Llewyn Davis on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where Llewyn sits in the wide frame, usually the edge. (camera)
Delbonnel shot anamorphic and then kept pushing Isaac off center. Llewyn stands in doorways, between walls, squeezed to one side of a wide image with the room's life happening beside him rather than around him.
Payoff: The format is built for grandeur and Delbonnel uses it to crowd one man out of his own picture.
Watch Isaac's left hand on the guitar neck while he sings. (performance)
Isaac trained as a musician and plays and sings everything himself, recorded live on set. The fingering is real, the timing is real, and the songs run as performances rather than as edited impressions of performance.
Payoff: You have to accept that Llewyn is actually good, which stops you from explaining his troubles as a lack of talent.
Listen to what you hear in the seconds after a song ends. (sound)
There is no score. Every note in the film is played by someone inside it. So when the music stops there is nothing underneath. Wind, street noise, a car engine, a room going quiet.
Payoff: The film keeps dropping you out of a full sound into a thin one, which is how it makes indifference audible. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. Those flat stretches with nothing to do but look and listen are what the reading calls pure optical and sound situations.
Follow the cat. Track where it goes and who is holding it. (setting)
A ginger cat slips out a latching door early and the film spends half its length chasing it. The animal moves on no human schedule. Llewyn crouches in hallways after it, carries it on the subway, lets it go, finds another.
Payoff: He manages a care for the animal he cannot manage for any person on screen, and the cat keeps living its own life across his.
Look at the color of the snow and of the lit rooms. (light)
Delbonnel drains the palette to muted green, gray and cold brown. The snow is exhausting rather than pretty. Interiors carry a little warmth, and every one of them belongs to somebody else and lasts one night.
Payoff: The look makes 1961 feel like something already remembered rather than something happening, and it makes every warm room temporary.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where Llewyn stands in the frame, and listen to the silence on either side of every song.