"The Brotherhood!"

The soirée kicks off with the screening of the annual video highlighting former honorees of the Lumière Award over the years. Then Frances McDormand reveals that their cinematographer of Burn After Reading, Emmanuel Lubezki, has nicknamed the Coens “the brotherhood,” adding,  “there are no special handshakes or secrets in this brotherhood.” 

There’s a shared sense of humor and the jubilant feeling of relating a common story. The brotherhood was established in Minnesota, in a Jewish suburb of the American Midwest, where a pack of dynamite would one day explode onto the world scene of cinema. Frances continues, “We’re a bit like the Beatles, and I’m Yoko Ono. I’m thrilled to have started my professional career in this brotherhood, and I hope it’ll continue for a long time, that we’ll keep riding off into the sunset, rifle in hand.” She concludes her speech with an enthusiastic “Vive la fraternité!” Her heartfelt discourse is followed by a musical interlude as Benabar performs a rendition of two Charles Aznavour tunes, chosen by the Coens themselves for the awards ceremony, Je me voyais déjà and Parce que tu crois.

The festivities resume with the screening of a rare, previously unseen film, courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna, a short by Ettore Scola about WWII, featuring footage of concentration camps and a protagonist who hides in a movie theater to escape the Nazis. Javier Bardem takes the microphone to comment. “First of all, I want to say that I was deeply touched by Scola’s film. It reminds us to say ‘never again,’ from Sudan to Palestine”… Then he addresses the brothers: “Ethan, Joel, I’m one lucky son of a bitch to be here to salute you and pay tribute to you. When I was 25, my brother and I watched Fargo and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’ll never be able to make a film like that!’ Seeing Frances in Fargo is something that has inspired me my entire life. What an amazing performance! A decade later, my agent told me, ‘The Coens want to meet you.’ I’d read the book No Country for Old Men in English, without understanding a thing, so I planned to turn them down. My agent fired back, ‘Are you crazy?! Go meet them in LA!’ I sat down at their office and confessed ‘I really admire your work, but I hate violence, I barely speak English and I can’t drive.’ They just burst out laughing! So I told myself, ‘Let’s do this!’ When we’d wrapped up filming, they gave me a cake with candles; on each candle was a photo of every character I’d killed in the film! They created a masterpiece, and they gave me the gift of a lifetime. I’ll never forget it! They made my dream come true.”
 

Then the climax arrives as the Coen brothers take the stage to accept their Lumière Awards. Joel Coen starts out by saying, “Your warm welcome is very touching, very moving. I didn’t expect it to be so overwhelming to look back on this 40-year adventure with Ethan. I wanted to say thank you. And thanks to everyone who’s been with us these past 40 years.” 
 

Ethan Coen adds: “One thing Javier didn’t mention is that, in addition to keeping a hair net on set, since he’d decided his character would be pale, he had an assistant who followed him around with an umbrella. He then declares, “thank you to the Lumière brothers, for inventing cinema. Without you, we wouldn’t have done anything!” Finally, Joel concludes, “I’m even more thrilled to receive this award here in France, where people love cinema so much.”

— Laura Lépine