In Competition: “No Country for Old Men” by Ethan and Joel Coen

The new Coen brother film No Country for Old Men, presented in Competition, marks the ninth time they have been selected at the Cannes Festival. They are three-time Best Director
award winners, for Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). They also won a Golden Palm with Barton
Fink. No Country for Old Men, based on a Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, takes place in the borderlands between Texas and Mexico. When Llewelyn Moss stumbles
upon two million dollars in cash in the middle of the desert, the proceeds from a drug deal that turned sour, he has absolutely no idea of how much trouble he’ll get into when he pockets the
money. Two men vow to hunt him down: the first is a demonical killer, who wants to eliminate him; the second is a conscientious sheriff, who wants to protect him.

“It’s as close as we’ll ever come to doing an action movie,” Joel Coen commented. “It’s a chase story. It’s a lot of physical activity to achieve a purpose.
It’s interesting in a genre way; but it was also interesting to us because it subverts the genre expectation. (…) There’s a good deal of humor in the book, although you
wouldn’t call it a humorous novel. It’s certainly very dark – and that was our defining characteristic. The book is also quite violent, quite bloody. So, the movie is probably the most
violent we’ve ever made. In that respect it reflects the novel, I hope, fairly accurately.”

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