made by Wim Wenders in 1974. Its one of his ‘road movies’ featuring a rather luckless but charming German writer/reporter and his reluctant custody of a 9 year old girl that her mother (a stranger) foists onto him in New York. He flies with her to Amsterdam and they search across Holland and northern Germany (where my mum is from) for her relatives. Its black and white and from the shape looks like it was shot on 16mm. The shots of German towns in the 70s are fascinating. It feels as if somethings haven’t changed in 30 years while others are (people smoking on a 747 for a start, looks so strange now). At last a film without blood, violence and constant swearing. I feel like its the first good film I have seen in an age. And how a 9 year old plays the role of this rather grumpy child is beyond me. Its acting without a trace of self-consciousness, and she and Rudiger Vogler enact their relationship so well. In a coupleof weeks they show the ‘next’ film Kings of the road, made a year or so later.

This is just the second Coen brothers film I’ve seen (the first was The Big Lebowski which is hilarious).
‘No Country’ is much more violent, though interestingly, like the Big Lebowski, starts and (kind of) ends with a voice-over from an old-timer reflecting on how things have changed. No Country seems firmly set in Texas, with some impresive vistas
early on in the film. I found its topic puzzling as there are clearly strong themes; violence, hunting, Texas culture
weapons, principles, changing times, buying shirts to cover up wounds and random acts, but random acts kept
decentring the narrative as the characters we assume are the main people exit from the film in unexpected
and kind of undeserved ways, often without us even seeing the act of violence that effects their exit. The film
seems to have a number of centres of gravity. One is the psychopathic killer played by Javier Bardem. He is like a
1960s ethnomethodologist in his refusal to tolerate and participate in casual idiomatic conversation. He goes to
the heart of things, in many senses. Scarey certainly, but almost likable by the end. One review of this film
claims that its concern is with ‘bad luck’ that organises the plot as well as the number of narratives that
we hear recounted within the film, including the brief story of the cattleman who aimed a shot at a steer in order
to slaughter it as it hung upside down in the slaughterhouse. The shot missed the animal’s brain and bounced off
two walls before landing in the cowboy’s left shoulder. As the film draws to a close, we get closer to the jaded
and eventually retired cop who reflects on violence and ponders whether life – or maybe Texas life – has always
been unpredictable and violent. In the very last frame he is telling about his dream of his dead father who is
calling him. Finally, there is a huge amount of blood in this film.