Say this is the easiest way to tell it to say nothing, because what really enacts the film is more than a story his back, the flame untouchable that pushes the unnameable and encourages a search. Somehow it is the reverse of a biography. The invariable and perhaps unseen tone of the film is desire. The overwhelming desire of the protagonist in folk music, presented as a fact rather than an argument. It is that it is so. No reason, cause or justify identification. The spirit of folk has touched him.

Then everything else, is something else, they are the variations of his life, what is happening, which is not fundamentally important and lacks any sense. In that happen the cause-effect chain it is literally squandered: nothing has a logic, a reason. No consequence is the effect of any cause. The off-meanings populate the passing of events, and in that landscape fleets imperturbable his desire.

There is a co-star of the film besides the singer that might have been Bob Dylan himself: it is Ulysses, a cat. The cat becomes representative of that off-radical sense of the facts of life. His appearance rate four movements highly unlikely, however, are those that are going to happen. First the cat disappears out the window, then reappears near a cute cafe in the body of another cat, later disappears again at the difference of the sexes and, finally, it is not known how reappears: returns home alone. Schrödinger’s cat seems -protagonist of this sadistic experiment of quantum physics- that embodies the paradox of being able to be in two places and even in two states at once. To Ulysses also can be added having the two sexes.

If the movie can be thought of as an anti-history, his protagonist, Lewyn Davis, one could say that is an anti-hero. No sublime feature of character, intelligence, nobility or courage decorates the attributes of his person. That’s another gem of this film. One who walks through the life with a desire not requires any specific and superlative characterology or embodies any exceptionality, because exceptional is the desire itself. Lewyn has a desire, otherwise it is an ordinary guy. However, that dream he chases that he does not leave and that accompanies him and makes him travel, go or return, move freely landscapes, making him a subject that is distinguished from those who simply exist. What makes sense for him is not simply he wants to exist but to pursue his dream accentuates this possibility.

But perhaps the masterful play of the film is the way as it is constructed: look like a Möbius strip. The point where the two ends are joined (where we turn one to connect to the other) is the first scene that is also the last, a single scene marking the beginning and the end, suggesting that there is no stopping point and that, somehow, the film is continuously restarts. There is no way to temporarily place it accurately. Its structure makes it indistinguishable from inside and outside, so from the life of Lewyn Davis can tell part of the story or folk music in the 60s in the US. The film dismantles fiction progress chronology as chained succession of facts. There is no progress, nothing has to go because neither better nor worse, but Lewyn dream pursued in life makes it more than just an existence. The title “About Lewyn Davis” shows that. “About” breaks with the aim of making the artist an idealized self.

So it is also a tribute to sublimation, in so far as its protagonist shows the style of the artist: does with his “sinthome” how to be and to circulate the world, transmuting melancholy to melody. Somehow, the artist goes beyond his neurosis. A dialogue-free scene says it better than any words. In the residence, in front of the elderly and demented father he plays one of his songs.

Then, as he entered, he left the room to ask the nurses to come to wash his ass and leaves. No neurotic reproach, no manifestation of pride in itself, no Oedipal legacy muddies the meeting. Only music.

Of course the desire of the Coen is also called in the work: the beauty and enjoyment of the images, the narration, the life flowing in the slums, the evocation of when traveling was to seek… they are the result of their desire for cinema. Perhaps not entirely coincidental being two, that the film mark carries a name that is not embodied in an individual. And it is already suggested by Freud and Lacan both the desire, carried to its logical conclusion, subverts narcissism, squanders the ego and invites us to delight, wonder, go in depth with… leaving to put a top on with the sense.

Irene Domínguez
https://colochosblog.wordpress.com/author/irenecolocha/