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.
Once you have seen it
Compare the first Gaslight set with the one that closes the film. (structure)
The film replays its opening at the end. Same stage, same song, same alley, same man waiting outside. The Coens build the loop as the largest gesture in the cut, so the week you watched is a circuit rather than a line.
Payoff: Llewyn perceives everything and changes nothing, and the shape of the film guarantees it instead of blaming him for it. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. A hero whose acts no longer alter his world is what the reading calls the crisis of the action-image, made here into architecture.
Look at the empty space around the stage in Grossman's club. (staging)
The Gaslight is cramped, warm, people pressed close. Chicago is the inverse. A vast cold room, one man listening, the stage marooned in an acoustic with nothing to bounce off. The audition is staged as distance.
Payoff: The room does the rejecting before anyone speaks, which is why the failure feels like a measurement rather than a judgment. In the reading: any-space-whatever (emptiness). That drained, disconnected room is what the reading calls an any-space-whatever, a place stripped of the coordinates a hero could act in.
Notice how scenes start without anything linking them to the last. (cutting)
The Coens cut out the connective tissue. A scene ends, another begins somewhere else, and the film supplies no bridge. Inside scenes the takes run long. Between them, time has holes in it.
Payoff: The rhythm reproduces a life that has lost its through line, where the days pile up without adding to each other.
Watch the highway to Chicago and count what you can actually see. (setting)
The night drive is headlights, sodium glow at truck stops, and dark. Goodman talks, Hedlund says nothing, and the road delivers no landscape. Llewyn comes back to the Village with nothing he did not leave with.
Payoff: The trip takes the shape of a journey and cancels every promise the shape makes.
Carry this in: Watch where Llewyn stands in the frame, and listen to the silence on either side of every song.