In a nutshell: A small town in the late 1940's. Barber Ed, realising his wife Doris is having an affair, plots blackmail, but nothing goes according to plan and Doris is arrested for murder. Meanwhile, Ed is strangely interesed in Birdy, a teenage pianist he believes could be a star.

The Coen brothers continue to riff off the styles of great American writers, following their Dashiell Hammett (Miller's Crossing) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Lebowski) films, with this variation on themes by James M. Cain. Early film versions of Cain's Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice streamlined his distinctive third acts, which seem like left-field sequels to the main stories. But here, the Cain homage carries through to The Man Who Wasn't There's strange finale, with the hero collapsing as ironies unnoticed earlier spin round to trap him.

After the popular acceptance of the Coen style in such warm-ish movies as Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, this is a chilly film, in stark black and white, as if the brothers want to get back to their core audience.

Surrounded by motormouths, Ed- played by Thornton in a somehow disturbing toupee- keep to himself. Sometimes he's distracted by tiny details or odd crusades, but usually he's uncommitted to any of his ambitionsand unresentful of the worst fate deals him. Ed refuses to take part in the story he is narrating or make any moral judgement at all, even on people who have done him enormous wrongs.

The Coen's trademark wry dialogue is present, with a literary love for the odd, everyday turn of phrase, and the terrific cast fit in perfectly with the style. Devotees note: a spinning hubcap/flying saucer serves the visual function here that in earlier Coen films was taken by a hat, a hula-hoop, a tumbleweed and a tin of pomade.

Any good?: Slowly paced for a thriller and with a hero many will find off-putting, this is nevertheless a gripping, unusual and challenging work from the most consistently brilliant filmmakers of the last decade.

Kim Newman

****

Beautifully performed, technically astounding, fiendishly intricate and steeped in knowing references, it's tempting to see The Man Who Wasn't There as just another day at the office for Joel and Ethan Coen. But those who complain should remember that Hitchcock, initial experiments aside, worked for five decades in one genre, that Woody Allen has been finding new angles on the same themes for a quarter of a century and that Tarantino, the most famous director of the last decade, hasn't so much as dipped his toe outside the crime genre.

And besides, look closely and there are differences. Most obvious is the choice to print in black-and-white, a first for the Coens, with their usual DoP Roger Deakins achieving incredible depth and texture by shooting in colour and then transferring to monochrome. Then there's a touch more emotional warmth than usual, a glimmer of Fargo-esque humanity- longing, despair and thwarted love- heating up those deep pools of black and wintry whites.

Like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There boasts a loose, rambling plot, with the Coens happy to let the story meander. Some scenes linger fractionally longer than they need to and others could have been excised altogether, but this is a story told in voiceover by a man who's anjoying the telling, so just relax and go with it. Moreover, there's an inspired gag that excuses andy superfluous waffle.

Of course, just how much enjoyment you get out of this will depend on your knowledge of the film noirs it's paying tribute to and slyly subverting. For while it's not vital to pick up on the James M Cain-isms that form the building blocks - just as you didn't have to know that Miller's Crossing was a homage to Dashiell Hammet and that The Big Lebowski to Raymond Chandler- it certainly helps. Indeed, Billy Bob Thornton drawing intently on a cigarette and pondering dry cleaning is a lot funnier after watching the po-faced agonising of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

And Thornton is funnier, his revelatory gift for deadpan humour elevating him above even a note-perfect support cast (most notably James Gandolfini and Scarlett Johansen). What's more, he invests a passive character of few words and somnolent actions with real emotional substance. Yes, you could argue that any man who feigns ignorance to his wife's infidelity deserves all he gets, but don't think that he doesn't care: the pain and anguish is etched all over his pinched, weathered face.

FINAL VERDICT: Returning to the immoral, double-dealing world of their debut Blood Simple, the Coens have again turned in a gripping, amusing and accomplished work. The unconverted will find little here to win them over, but fans od the brothers grim will be delighted.

Jamie Graham

****

CANNES: Froggy Reviews New Coen Bros. Film!! THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE!!

Beware... there be spoilers ahead. Froggy reporting in after the first press screening of the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE. I read this script a year ago, and when told that the Coens would be shooting for the first time in black and white, I felt that this film would be something special. It is.

Imagine, if you will, the exquisitely detailed art direction of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, with the pathos and wit of FARGO, and you have some idea of the atmosphere of this new film. You can't really call it a film noir by traditional means (as if anything the Coens produce can be easily encapsulated... how many film noirs have subplots about alien abduction, piano prodigies, gay door-to-door salesmen, and sidebars on the eight types of young men's hairstyles), but if the poster is anything to go by, that's the closest you'll get to a genre for it.

The title of the film really says a lot. Billy Bob Thornton plays Ed, a barber in a small Northern Calfornia town, sometime in the late 1940's or 50's. He's a quiet man, passive certainly, and he goes about his daily life with a silence and laconic fatalism. You wouldn't probably know what he was thinking if it wasn't for his voiceover, which hangs over the film from beginning to end.

Ed spends his day silently cutting hair while his brother-in-law (Michael Baladucco, from THE PRACTICE and O BROTHER) yaps away all day long. The only time Ed draws breath is to murmur 'Uh-huh', or more likely to draw in from the unfiltered cigarettes that are permanently attached to his lip. This is certainly a smoker's movie.

Ed's wife, Doris, is carrying on an affair with the (also married) owner of the department store where she works as a bookkeeper. Ed knows about it, the way a husband knows these things, but he doesn't seem to carry the inclination to confront, or even object, about the situation. Doris is played by the exquisite Frances McDormand, and the store owner by the brilliant James Gandolfini. Doris is not a villain, nor even unsympathetic to her husband. "You know I love you, Ed" she says, as he shaves her legs in the bath. But it's not the sort of love that Ed is sustained by.

Ed's life takes a turn with the arrival of a salesman (Jon Polito), looking for an investor to help him start a franchise of a radical new clothing stain removal process called "Dry Cleaning". All he needs is $10 000. Ed sees this as his way out of his ordinary life. He sends an anonymous letter to Gandolfini, as someone that knows about the affair he's having, and threatens to expose him and Doris "to Ed" unless an amount of $10 000 is paid.

What happens next doesn't really warrant exposition. You have to follow the path this movie takes for yourself - the unpredictabilities of the plot are one of the major joys. I just want to mention a couple of things as to why this movie is such a masterpiece.

The look of the film. Honestly, the production design nearly made me weep. The opening credits have the titles falling in front of a twirling barber shop pole, and the letters fall as shadows across and below it. The lighting echoes the great noir films but you're never made to feel as though the Coens are trying too hard. I know that this sort of thing isn't effortless, but each shot is composed so perfectly, they're all like paintings.

The performances are all faultless. Billy Bob Thornton, as Ed, will surely be a favourite to take out Best Actor at the festival. He's magnificent as this everyday man who has had the life sucked out of him (not that there's anything to suggest he had much in him to begin with). Everyone else is great, but special mention goes out to Richard Jenkins as a local solicitor, and Scarlet Johannson as his blossoming teenage daughter who Ed takes an interest in. Finally, the great, great Tony Shalhoub has three scene chewing sequences as Ed's lawyer. Supporting Actor Oscar time for Tony, methinks.

I think this is a perfect film, that could dangerously be considered one for film-buffs, but I think that's not a bad thing. On the outside it doesn't appear to have abundantly more commercial potential that O Brother or Big Lebowski, even though I think it is much more refined and certainly more engaging. I do think it's an Oscar contender though. Those two earlier films were certainly a whole lot of fun, but for those people who were waiting for the Coens to get back to drama, I really think you're gonna get off on THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE.

The Coens are at the peak of their form.

Froggy .

FILMFESTIVALS.COM CANNES 2001 REVIEW / INTERVIEW

Since their Palme d'Or triumph with Barton Fink in 1991, the Coen brothers have always come to Cannes with a vital competition entry. Ten years later, following last year's genial musical comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? with almost indecent haste, they're back with perhaps their most ambitious film in an eclectic career. Formerly called The Barber Project and presented in black and white, The Man Who Wasn't There promises to be a suitably laconic film noir, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Ed, a hairdresser in a small northern California town. His life is dull and unfulfilled, so when his wife has an affair, he uses the information to blackmail the adulterer. As one might expect from the creators of Blood Simple and Fargo, however, the path of true crime does not run smoothly. When the Coens first announced the project, it was greeted with a certain amount of cynicism. Indeed, when they claimed during pre-production on O Brother that that film would be based on Homer's Odyssey, more than a few eyebrows were raised. But the Coens have always had a strange relationship with both the press and their fans alike, who trawl through their work for themes, motifs and in-jokes, and think the brothers' unwillingness to explain everything makes them, frankly, difficult.

"Yeah," says Ethan, "Y'know, we're pretty honest and open in interviews, it's just that when someone's reading doesn't match your own, they sometimes think you're being coy and withholding something by not joining the discussion."

In the case of O Brother, they say the Homer angle was never intended to be taken too seriously. "If audiences did approach it with a certain amount of scepticism," says Joel, "they would certainly be justified. I don't think it would in any way hurt their experience of the movie! But saying that the movie is based on The Odyssey is not [entirely] untrue. It was the loosest kind of interpretation of the material.

" Ethan: "The truth of the matter is that it wasn't inspired by The Odyssey in as much as it wasn't our starting point. The story was just somewhat reminiscent of The Odyssey as we discovered while writing it. When we realised we were doing something that sort of resemble The Odyssey, we made more explicit references to it."

Joel: "I think it would be amusing if they did go through O Brother Where Art Thou looking for really obscure references, because all they would find are unintentional ones. The references that are in the movie are fairly obvious and broad. The rest of it has nothing to do with The Odyssey. It wasn't our intention to set it up as a game."

Their position as American indie auteurs means their silence is seen as gnomic, and Ethan once lamented that their more serious fans would write essays and send them in for verification. "We make the movies ­ then we get homework," he quipped. But they are quick to say they don't have a problem with such people.

"It can be amusing," says Joel, "depending on what the interpretation is. It's never irritating no. We feel people are free to interpret or read the work as they please.

" Ethan: "Really, it's just part of the process. You make the movie and journalists have to write about something and people in cinema studies programmes have to write about something. I don't know. There it is."

Joel: "Like I said before, we really feel people are free to read the movie however they please and we don't object to that kind of analysis. What I think you're referring to is the fact that we often resist the efforts of journalists or people who are interviewing us to enlist us in that process ourselves. And we resist it not because we object to it but simply because it isn't something that particularly interests us."

Joel: "We're happy to talk about the stuff that interests us, and we just don't have much to say about the stuff that doesn't interest us. But I think that's just natural with any conversation." This preoccupation with their own 'interests' has led many to see the Coens as isolationist in their outlook, and perhaps a factor in their relative uncommerciality. The success of O Brother scotched that myth once and for all, but they certainly claim not to have any preconceived notions of an audience. "We don't really think about it at all," says Joel. "I don't know what to say. You're forced to think about it in the most general, calculating way when you're trying to get money for it. But, that aside, we don't really think who the audience is."

Which may explain their intention to make a black and white movie. Rumours abound that a version of the film, shot on colour stock, will be released in certain territories in a colour version, but Joel insist this is not the case.

"It's a black and white movie," he states. "It'll be released theatrically in black and white and also for video and DVD. It's being shot on colour negative and printed on black and white film, but that is purely at the request of the distributor because their output deal gives them a completely different deal for colour films, and they want to have the option of being able to release it in ancillary markets in its desaturated colour version. But frankly that's a bastardised version of the movie that we're not concerned with and we can't imagine anyone would want to see anyway. It's a black and white movie."

Ethan: "It's being shot on colour stock for technical reasons that happily coincide with the legalistic reasons. For faster colour stock, we need less light."

Joel: "The stocks available to you are much better in colour, even if you're printing it and making a black and white film. The only thing you can't do with colour stock is you can't filter it the way you would with black and white stock."

They also have another surprise...

Joel: "Curiously, almost everyone in the movie wears a wig, or a hairpiece. So BBT, who plays the principal character, is wearing one, James Gandolfini wears one, Tony Shalhoub wears one, Jon Polito wears one..."

Ethan: "But Polito's the only one who wears a toupée in the fiction of the movie. Gandolfini and BBT are both kind thinning on top..."

Joel: "...So the overall effect is that it really transforms the appearance of the actors. You almost don't recognise them." One name Coen aficionados will recognise, however, is that of the mysterious 'Roderick Jaynes', the cranky Brit who edits their films but keeps himself to himself between times.

Ethan: "He doesn't work between our movies. No one's seen him lately." Joel: "He's probably at some BAFTA event. He's a member of BAFTA He was nominated for an award, and every nominee automatically becomes a member. So we have his membership card."

Damon Wise