Inside Llewyn Davis BFI London Film Festival Gala Premiere

Tuesday night a team of DCM crew were in attendance for the glitzy BFI Centrepiece Gala Premiere of Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ hotly anticipated film following the huge success of their last collaboration, True Grit.

The event took place at the Odeon Leicester Square and in attendance were Ethan and Joel Coen, alongside the stars of their film Oscar Isaacs [Drive], John Goodman and our very own Carey Mulligan. The film is a period piece set in New York during a week in the winter of 1961, which follows meagre existence of Llewyn Davis, an embittered folk singer whose life pans out like a lamenting folk song; effectively homeless in the icy confines of New York City, crashing on the couches of those who have not yet tired of his selfish ways, wandering aimlessly by day and playing for a dwindling audience in the Gaslight Bar, a dingy club in Greenwich Village, the centre of the 60s folk scene.

This being a Coen Brothers film, there are some moments of warmth and humour to keep the audience on Llewyn’s side. An ongoing plot device in the film is his careless loss of a cat whose name, revealed towards the end, summarises the existence of our lead character as he journeys through the Big Apple. The scenes are uniformly shot with a blue filter to amplify the feeling of hostility; the coldness is broken in the plush Lower West Side apartment of an empathetic professor friend, when we feel the warmth of a home that Llewyn has clearly never experienced. There are some great performances in the film, including Justin Timberlake taking a turn as a wholesome God- fearing folk singer, and John Goodman steals the show as a slothful jazz man with problems of his own.

Folk music plays a huge role in the film with old folk songs being performed, representing the unchanging life of Llewyn Davis. Mulligan’s real – life husband, Marcus Mumford, provides the movie with some more contemporary folk songs, making the film relevant to an audience who don’t necessarily know the origins of folk music.

The Q&A session after the film was informative and saw the Coen brothers cracking jokes with BFI’s Karen Gillan, allowing the audience to ask questions about the more abstract elements within the film. But perhaps the funniest moment of the evening was a personally recorded introduction to the film by Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who cheekily claims the Coen Brothers as our own on account of their father growing up in the UK!