°Burn After Reading
I couldn’t disagree more with the few reviews I’ve perused.
Burn After Reading is hilarious, and smart. The derisory remarks about “goofing around with their buddies”, “inside jokes”, and so on are true enough, but I see nothing wrong with a refusal to address some apparently indifferentiable ‘public sphere’ invoked in phrases like “what matters to you”.
In any case, a return to the canon-busting, precariously affective landscape of Blood Simple, to the topic of libidinal economies of, well, most of their films, and breathtakingly, screwball funny. It’s not a political film, if one assumes a particular boundary to what politics is. What’s not to like? And, despite the trajectories drawn by most reviews, a comedy far darker - which is to say, far less sentimental - than that of No Country for Old Men, which was kind of funny, up to a point and in a limited way. Unlike the turn to mourning that marked the latter, in the world of Burn After Reading there are no (operable) priests nor police - the first regarded as thankfully lapsed orthodoxy, the second as a vast apparatus reduced to cleaners, commentators and surveillance; all of whose capacity to “intervene” in the unfolding play fails miserably. Who would want it to work?
