The Neon Demon

I remember being in something of a minority regarding Nicolas Winding Refn’s last film ‘Only God Forgives’ – i.e. I liked it. Notwithstanding the welter of bad reviews, I was convinced that Refn had found the most brutal yet visually beautiful way possible of crafting a statement on the brutality and ultimate futility of violence.

At its most striking, ‘The Neon Demon’ is every bit as visually stunning as ‘Only God Forgives’, but that’s all it really deals in: surface sheen. Yes, there’s an argument to be made that the film’s subject – fashion, modelling, and pursuit of success in said milieu at the cost of everything else – demands nothing more than surface sheen. Let’s face it, if you want to satirise the fashion industry, all you’d need to do is point a camera at it and wait for it to become a parody of itself. Which it would do pretty quickly. In fact, you’d barely have time to make a cup of coffee and butter a slice of toast.

Yet ‘The Neon Demon’ always seems to be just a missing scene or another draft of the script away from being something more. The aesthetic ranges from Cronenbergian body horror to a Lynchian exploration of the how the internal landscape is mapped onto the external (or maybe vice versa), while the narrative is a complete mishmash, clearly wanting to evoke classic “rags-to-riches” and “rise-and-fall” stories but mainly chugging along at the level of ‘Showgirls’. If Verhoeven had thrown in necrophilia and cannibalism.

Ah, yes: the contentious stuff. I’d like to think that its inclusion is another indicator of the something else that Refn was striving for – at the very least, the most extreme juxtaposition possible with unnamed but Svengali-esque fashion designer (Allesandro Nivola)’s assertion that “beauty is everything” – but I’m more inclined to believe that it’s simply a reaction to the outrage over ‘Only God Forgives’; a case, in other words, of Refn thinking “okay, you fuckers, this time I’ll give you something to really get offended about”.

The offensiveness-o-meter registers its first blip when small town girl Jesse (Elle Fanning), just 16, orphaned and looking for fame and fortune in the big city, encounters Hank (Keanu Reeves), the manager of the shitty motel she’s lodging at. Hank’s an odious individual from the off; as the film progresses, Hank attempts to pimp out the 13-year old runaway in the next room to Jesse’s wet-leaf boyfriend Dean (Karl Glusman) – “some real Lolita shit” is how Hank delicately puts it. Later, Jesse ascribes an attempted incursion into her room to Hank, then hears him barging into the minor’s room and a lot of commotion ensuing that sounds decidedly unpleasant. At this point, terrified, she flees the motel and seeks refuge with make-up guru Ruby (Jena Malone).

Ah yes: Ruby. Jesse meets Ruby at one of her early photoshoots and utterly fails to identify her as a predatory lesbian, the single character trait that the script bothers to offer her. As well as seemingly doing every model in LA’s makeup, Ruby moonlights at a mortuary where she prepares cadavers, making them as lifelike as possible for their open coffins. This would have been the film’s best satirical hit, only Refn takes it that bit further … and by “that bit further” I mean straight through the barrier marked “good taste”, all the way down the dead-street signposted “if it was good enough for Jörg Buttgereit, it’s good enough for me” and up in flames as it goes barrelling into the concrete wall spray-painted with “way to go emptying the cinema like that, dude”. Said scene is the most thankless thing modern cinema has ever done with Jena Malone and that includes casting her in ‘Batman vs Superman’ and then consigning her to the cutting room floor. And even then, let’s spare a thought for poor Cody Renee Cameron as the other, uh, participant. Sort of participant. Ahem, moving swiftly on …

It’s also through Ruby that Jesse meets established model Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and aspiring model Sarah (Abbey Lee) – their characterisation runs to sullen with a tendency to bitchiness and sullen with a tendency to self-loathing respectively – and seems apprehensive of them right up to the point where Nivola’s predictably arrogant designer picks her on a whim to be the New Face of Whatever. Granted, Jesse’s transformation from sweet and innocent to not so, played out in a single scene, is the film’s equivalent of the “Club Silencio” sequence from ‘Mulholland Drive’ and lingers in the mind just as effectively.

To be fair, there’s quite a bit that ‘The Neon Demon’ gets right. It’s graced with good performances – Fanning is terrific; Malone, Heathcote and Lee all surpass the thin gruel they’re given to work with; and I haven’t seen Reeves this engaged with a role in ages. Cliff Martinez’s score gives the head-fuck imagery an unnerving aural accompaniment. And speaking of imagery, step forward cinematographer Natasha Braier. A lot of talent and a lot of thought – particularly around the symbolism in Jesse’s hallucinatory scenes – has gone into the production. It’s just that the end result seems so hollow. Had Refn’s go-for-the-jugular approach, rammed home as it is with such exquisite commitment to bad taste, been aimed at a more labyrinthine and multi-layered subject, ‘The Neon Demon’ could have been a visceral and essential work of cinema instead of a vaguely unsatisfying one.

Drive

‘Drive’ is the best film Michael Mann never made. If Nicolas Winding Refn wasn’t watching ‘Thief’ on a loop at every stage of pre- and post-production – not to mention mainlining Tangerine Dream during the shoot – then I don’t know jack shit about cinema and I’ll draw down the shutters on this blog. ‘Drive’ is ‘Thief’ reimagined, from its clinically professional anti-hero betrayed by a yearning towards a domestic idyll, to its depiction of a precisely striated criminal hierarchy and the spiral of violence that represents the fallout of its protagonist’s careening journey from the periphery of said hierarchy to its viciously amoral centre.

But it’s more than mere copyism. ‘Drive’ is about as pure a cinematic love letter to a particular genre and a particular style of filmmaking as I’ve ever seen. Even the post-‘Jackie Brown’ movie movies of Tarantino are shot through with a knowing sense of post-modern irony even as they lovingly trawl the all-but-forgotten quarters of 70s exploitation cinema. ‘Drive’ never once tips a wink to its audience or takes a wily bow from the gallery. It lives its influences with the utmost passion and respect and sincerity.

It’s also the film I’ve been wanting Mann to make for a couple of decades now; or rather the style of filmmaking I’ve been wanting him to get back to. From the scrawled day-glo lettering of its opening credits, to its neon-drenched back-street cityscape, ‘Drive’ embodies the cool-as-fuck, unpretentious purity of Mann’s work before his gorgeous melding of perfectly lit visuals with the grittiness of film noir was bleached out by his wholesale embrace of digital cinematography. Certainly ‘Drive’ is a better nocturne – a far more aesthetically appealing black valentine to a violent city – than Mann’s own ‘Collateral’.*

In ‘Drive’, Ryan Gosling plays a character known only as The Driver or “Kid”, the latter appellation bestowed upon him by Shannon (Bryan Cranston) for whom he works, by day, as a movie stunt driver and a mechanic in Shannon’s autoshop. Shannon has dreams of managing The Driver on the professional racing circuit, and to this end solicits backing from mobsters Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman). By night, The Driver is a getaway driver for hire to LA’s underclass, his terms and conditions ruthlessly simple: “You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own.”

Thus the stripped-down, automotive existence which defines The Driver. Adapted from the novel by James Sallis, Refn and scriptwriter Hossein Amini eradicated The Driver’s backstory, miring him in a moment-by-moment present. He emerges, variously, as enigmatic, romantic, brutal, heroic and just about anything else you care to project onto the existential canvas of Gosling’s minimalist performance.

What happens to complicate The Driver’s life, and to uncover the various facets of his persona, is a platonic romance with his elfin neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan). Her latino husband Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) is serving out the last weeks of a jail sentence. The Driver is drawn, protectively, towards Irene and her young son Benicio (Kaden Leos), but seems to harbor no antagonism towards Standard. When Standard is released from prison, he is initially wary of The Driver. When Standard is assaulted by goons in the pay of Cook (James Bibieri), a gangster to whom he owes $40,000, The Driver finds himself acting for Standard in his professional capacity when Cook coerces Standard into a pawn shop robbery to pay off the debt.

The job goes wrong from the beginning and The Driver, by now Irene’s protector in very real terms, is forced into an odyssey through LA’s underworld to track down his and Standard’s betrayer. No prizes for guessing how close to home the trail leads him.

‘Drive’ occupies a crime movie aesthetic of which ‘Thief’ is but its most obvious touchstone. The Driver’s name (or rather the job description by which he’s known) conjures the Walter Hill classic of the same title. His transition from focused professional to someone whose façade of calm masks a feverish working out of all possible angles establishes him as a continentally-separated next-of-kin to Alain Delon in Melville’s ‘Le Samourai’. The crunching but somehow morally-centered violence – notably scenes involving the non-woodwork-based application of a hammer and a repeatedly stomped-on head – could have issued from, say, Chan-wook Park’s psyche. The car chases, slow-burn tension and effortless moody cool evoke the glory days of American cinema (i.e. the 70s) when every other film seemed to be a masterpiece.

Do I consider ‘Drive’ a masterpiece? By a short margin, yes. I think it’s the fullest expression thus far of Refn’s ability to meld form, style and content. Granted, it doesn’t so much wear its influences on its sleeve as stitch them into a onesie and fully engulf itself, but this works to its betterment where a lesser director would just emerge as a cheap plagiarist. Refn coalesces a cinephile’s lifetime love of genre tropes, moody anti-heroes and iconography that functions on an almost pornographic level, and creates something, underpinned as it is by the most demure romantic subplot that an 18-rated movie has ever crafted, that is flavoured with the immediacy of his own authorial signature.



*In the interests of accuracy, ‘Drive’ was shot on an Arri Alexa digital camera. Amazingly, given the vast budgetary difference between the two, ‘Drive’ avoids the “flat” cinematography of ‘Collateral’ and boasts such a rich palette and depth of focus that I honestly believed it had been shot on film.

Only God Forgives

The most immediate and jarring trick Nicolas Winding Refn pulls in ‘Only God Forgives’ is the shatteringly out-of-whack ratio of visual beauty (cinematography) to visceral ugliness (mise en scene). The only way I can describe it is as if ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ had been lensed by Jack Cardiff. Seriously: this is the ‘Black Narcissus’ of venal brutality, the ‘Matter of Life and Death’ of rape/revenge.

Ooops, I’m sorry. Did anyone trip over the Powell & Pressburger references in the above paragraph. Sorry, but they were incorporated deliberately. Of this, more later.

The most guiltily pleasurable and equally jarring trick Refn pulls in ‘Only God Forgives’ is taking the kind of role that you’d normally associate with, say, Shelley Winters in ‘Bloody Mama’ or Irene Dailey in ‘The Grissom Gang’ and handing it to that most elegant, refined and cultured of English roses Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s a performance that’s already being compared to Ben Kingsley in ‘Sexy Beast’.

The plot is pure 70s exploitation: in Bangkok, two American brothers – Billy (Tom Burke) and Julian (Ryan Gosling) – run a boxing club as a front for drug smuggling (the logistics are never really gone into). Julian spends his leisure time tied to a chair and voyeuristically watching bought-and-paid-for escort Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) bring herself off. Billy, on the other hand, goes out looking for violent sex, the younger his partner the better. One night, having failed to persuade a pimp to pimp out his 14-year-old daughter, Billy assaults the man then beats one of his girls to death. This latter, mercifully, occurs offscreen. Bangkok’s finest arrive on the scene, in the personage of Inspector Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) and his men. Chang, a vicious man with a zen-like centre of calmness, dispenses his own paperwork-free, let’s-not-bother-the-courts-with-it brand of justice by locking Billy in a room with the girl’s father who does what any grieving father would do if given access to his daughter’s murderer. Exeunt Billy.

(At this point, it’s perhaps a good idea to consider the film’s title as only half of the dialectic. Try ‘Only God Forgives … But Devils Mete Out Infinite Punishment’ for size.)

Chang then braces the father, accusing him of complicity in his daughter’s slide into prostitution. Exhorting him to focus not on his dead child, but his other three daughters who are still alive, Chang hammers the message home by chopping off the guy’s hand. Next up, this poor son of a bitch is quaking in the corner of a dingy room as Julian, flanked by two heavies, draws down on him. Julian, evidently the more philosophical of the siblings, gives him a chance to account for his actions. Subsequently, he lets him go.

With this narrative arc explored over 90 minutes, ‘Only God Forgives’ could have hiked its way up to a small hillock of high ground, declaring itself a morality play. In Refn’s hands, this is just the first 15 minutes and the narrative explodes in any number of horrible directions as vituperative, foul-mouthed matriarch Crystal (Scott Thomas) comes jetting into Bangkok looking for vengeance and less than impressed with Julian’s lack of a proactive approach. Learning of Chang’s part in the proceedings, Crystal instigates a particularly ill-thought-out campaign of violent retribution which only serves to focus Chang’s attention on Julian.

Essentially, the story is: A does something violent to B as a result of which C does something violent, after which D does something violent, and then hey ho whaddaya know, E, F and G are whipping out swords and guns and H, I and J are leaking corpuscles all over the place. To put it another way, imagine Tolstoy’s novella ‘The Forged Coupon’, in which one deceitful act sets in motion a chain of consequences which negatively affects everyone involved, no matter how peripherally, updated to Bangkok and drenched in blood, and that’s where we’re at.

‘Only God Forgives’ has been dividing the critics as sharply as any of Chang’s swordplay. Writers on film who I personally consider my go to guys for recommendations have professed emotional responses bordering on hatred. I’ll admit that I had two strong drinks before I took my seat in the cinema. And it has to be admitted, Refn sails very close to hoisting himself by his own petard. Symbolism isn’t just introduced, it grabs the viewer by their lapels, hauls them up close to the screen and yells in their face whilst slapping them with a wet kipper. Religious overtones roll up their sleeves, point to crucifix tattoos on their bulging biceps and ask you if you faakin’ want some. The soundtrack is probably annotated as Symphony in Self-Importance in A(hole) Major.

And yet, despite the melodrama, the glacial pace (there are pregnant pauses in the dialogue that leave you itching for a gynaecologist to turn up and perform a caesarean) and the sheer unremitting nastiness of the whole thing, Refn wrestles a sense of accomplishment from the material. Partly it's in the incredibly focussed application of cinematography. The first scene is at the boxing club, two fighters squaring off in the ring. One wears blue trunks, the other red. The cloudless sky of the firmament vs the fiery infernos of hell? The opposing PR palette of political parties, both of whom betray their electorate and stand by and watch young men die? Your humble blogger on a pint too far and reading way too much into this? Whichever interpretation you choose, the film’s visual aesthetic is established within seconds. And undeviated from. ‘Only God Forgives’ never, for a second, looks anything less than stunning.

And partly it’s in the way Refn reflects the film’s ugly/beautiful dichotomy back at the audience. I mentioned earlier that the pace is glacial. This is because the characters spend more time moodily watching things than they do participating in them. Chang’s colleagues blankly watch his moribund karaoke performances; Julian watches Mai in solo flagrante; a disabled child watches Chang interrogate a suspect; Crystal watches Julian disastrously square off against Chang when her incessant campaign of needling and provoking him finally yields results. It’s worth noting how many of these watchers are confined to their seats, either by bonds, sharp implements or muscular dystrophy. And those who aren’t, watch out of prurience.

As the sexually liberated ethos of the 60s began to permeate British cinema, Michael Powell proved himself half a decade or so ahead of his time with ‘Peeping Tom’, a film that pretty much destroyed his career and wasn’t hailed as the masterpiece it so evidently is until the late 80s. Penned by former spy Leo Marks, that film was an examination of scoptophilia (i.e. “the morbid desire to watch”). Powell unblinkingly turned the camera on his audience and royally pissed them off in the process. Refn does something unapologetically similar with ‘Only God Forgives’, and if the critical response to the film thus far is anything to go by he’s rubbed a fuckton of salt into the still-open wound that Powell inflicted.

Bronson

Muchos gracias to my friend Tony for tipping me the nod to 'Bronson'. It came and went at the cinema and the one trailer I saw for it left me disinclined to go and see it. The trailer was basically a cavalcade of hard nut vs authority iconography: here's Charlie Bronson as a schoolboy smacking one of his teachers; here's Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy) as an adult in a bare-knuckled boxing bout; here's Charlie Bronson, all shaven head and extravagent moustache, locked up in jail and swinging roundhouse as a phalanx of guards in full riot gear come charging at him. The trailer, in short, promised little more than fists, boots and truncheons, all delivered in the aggressive/iconic style that has typified (and swiftly cliched) British crime flics since Guy Ritchie did his wide-boy/cool-guy thing with 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' twelve years ago.

I should have done my homework. I should have taken note of the fact that Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn was the talent behind the uncompromising 'Pusher' trilogy. (As well as, bizarrely enough, an episode of 'Miss Marple' for TV. Sadly, it doesn't feature the grey-haired, tea-drinking, inestimably polite septaguarian sleuth launching herself at the chief suspect with a rousing cry of "Cam on then, yew fackin cahnt" and extricating a confession by means of repeated blows to the head.) I should have pegged Tom Hardy as the guy who gave such a magnificently dark characterisation of Bill Sykes in the recent BBC dramatisation of 'Oliver Twist' (though he did beef up in extremis for his role as Bronson). I should have listened to the pundit who tagged 'Bronson' as "a 'Clockwork Orange' for the twenty-first century" and not dismissed it as a glib pullquote.

So again: hat doffed to Tony for the lend of the DVD. 'Bronson' is indeed comparable to 'A Clockwork Orange'. Like Kubrick's divisive classic, it deals with a reprehensible character rendered iconoclastic by dint of being purely, simply and unapologetically who he is (ie. true to himself). Like Kubrick's film, it pits said protagonist against The System. Like Kubrick's film, it finds The System deeply and ludicrously at fault. Like Kubrick's film, it is redolent with scenes of violence and shot through with an aesthetic of amorality, and yet remains a work of satire. And like Kubrick's film, it's often funny as fuck - never mind that for the most part it shouldn't be!


Charlie Bronson - officially Britain's most violent prisoner - was born Michael Peterson. He took Bronson as his "fighting name". Refn's depiction of this defining moment is emblematic of his approach to the material. Urged by his effete associate Paul (Matt King) that a prerequisite for his success on the underground bare-knuckle fighting circuit is a name more memorable than the one on his birth certificate - "something like a movie star, lovey" - Peterson sits and mulls it over for a while. Then a look spreads across his face: it's inspiration, revelation and epiphany all rolled into one. Grinning, he slowly enunciates the four syllables of the name he's hit upon: "Charlton Heston." Paul rolls his eyes in despair; "Oh please, dear," he protests, "the man's a cunt." They settle on Charles Bronson instead.

It's a splendid moment that punctures the bad boy mythos that surrounds Bronson. Refn is less interested in Bronson the recidivist or Bronson the brawler; he's more interested in Bronson the media celebrity ... and in how Bronson can almost be considered a product/legend/icon (delete as appropriate) of his own creating. Much of Refn's staging of the film is just that: staging. His use of artifice is almost theatrical, down to Bronson prowling a theatre stage, narrating expositional monologues as if performing a one-man show. The finale has Bronson take hostage an art-therapist who has been encouraging him to express himself creatively. Bronson embraces his new found talent, but the more his sponsor talks him up as an artist, the more defiant is Bronson's ultimate response. It's as if he's not only unable to escape the battling, brawling, thorn in the side of The System that he is, but he wouldn't even if he could. Bronson forces his captive to become a living part of a Matisse-inspired performance piece, then casually invites the riot squad in the moment he's finished and gets down to the equally important business (certainly in his estimation) of a knock-down drag-out fight. Bronson as performance artist, with violence a necessary part of the performance.

Refn earns another point of comparison to 'A Clockwork Orange' in his use of classical music. The hostage/Matisse/punch-up scene plays out to the gentle strains of 'The Flower Duet' by Delibes. An earlier return to jail, Bronson frogmarched to solitary confinement, merits Siegfried's funeral march from Wagner's 'Gotterdammerung' - the music, allayed with Tom Hardy's swaggering performance, turns Bronson's impending incarceration into something ballsy and defiant and magnificent.

Come to think of it, "ballsy, defiant and magnificent" is a decent description of Refn's achievement with 'Bronson'. The film's energy, immediacy, intensity and imagery belie its £150,000 budget. Only its paucity of locations and the occasional lo-fi bits of sound recording mark it out as being made for less than the catering budget on even a moderate Hollywood production. In fact I'm all for saying that as soon as Refn gets his hands on a budget of any significance - and has the nous to reunite with the frankly freakin' awesome Hardy, who embarked on a punishing training routine to capture Bronson's physicality - it could well be a case of come in, Hollywood, your time is up.