No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men is a film written and directed by the Coen brothers – it stars Tommy Lee Jones, as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and Josh Brolin, as Llewellyn Moss, and Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. The story starts with Chigurh and he is arrested by a sheriff’s deputy; as the deputy is telling the sheriff, on the phone, that he’d arrested Chigurh we see (with it being a close up and the focus being on the deputy) in the background Chigurh getting his handcuffs in front of himself, getting up and walking slowly to the deputy. This is a good way of starting the film as it gives the audience a sense of foreboding about the character of Bardem – what will he do next? Will the police catch him…etc. The scenes where we see Llewellyn hunting connotates claustrophobia (at first when I heard Ms. Heald say this in class I didn’t really understand what she meant as feelings of claustrophobia should be from narrow corridors or small spaces and the dessert is really big. But once I actually seen the film I understood what she meant). We get a sense of claustrophobia from the desert particularly because of the mise en scene – the colour of the screen when we watch it helps as it conveys the heat and humidity of the desert to the audience thus giving us a feeling of claustrophobia from the impression of enclosure. The part of the film with Llewellyn where he goes back to the place with the dead Mexicans and he is being chased by some other Mexicans; the point of view shot, from the people in the truck, chasing Llewellyn where you can see him running and him kind of popping in and out of the headlights really gives the audience a sense of urgency and fear for the livelihood of Llewellyn. Another scene with Llewellyn that I think connotates the effects of urgency is the bit where he has stolen the truck and there’s a shot of him inside the truck with the camera angle slightly angled toward the right and suddenly there is Chigurh’s trademark ‘air shots’ towards the truck; the windscreen is being shot at and this really gives the viewer the feeling of themselves being shot at, but at the same time we see Llewellyn’s reaction.