WORDS Eoin Mc Cague
After the skull-crushing success of 2011’s Drive, the Internet held its collective breath to see which project Nicolas Winding Refn, their newly appointed King of Cool, would tackle next. A big budgeted remake of Logan’s Run? I Walk With the Dead, a horror film featuring explicit sex scenes starring Carey Mulligan? A sequel to Valhalla Rising set in modern day Tokyo? A fourth Pusher?
The answer surprised nobody. When you have miraculously convinced mainstream audiences to embrace your neon drenched, synth driven, Ryan Gosling led vision; God wouldn’t be the only one to forgive you for giving it another go. On paper Refn’s Only God Forgives fits the bill as a perfect companion piece to the BAFTA nominated Drive. Except that couldn’t be further from the truth. The easiest way to differentiate the two is to ask the director himself. “Drive,” Refn told the LA Film Festival recently, “was like getting the best cocaine and doing it all night long. But Only God Forgives is like doing acid. Not the kind where you sit in a chair and see things — the kind of good acid where you become the chair.”
Only God Forgives is like doing acid. Not the kind where you sit in a chair and see things — the kind of good acid where you become the chair
Gosling plays Julian, the co-owner of a Muay Thai boxing club in Bangkok with his brother Billy (Tom Burke). The club is an elaborate front for drug smuggling, and the two brothers are revealed to be naturally violent and disturbed gangsters exiled in a foreign land for reasons unknown. When Billy viciously rapes and murders a sixteen-year-old prostitute and is himself murdered by the girl’s father, Julian is tasked by his mother (Kristen Scott Thomas) to “raise hell”. Through his inability to exact revenge immediately, he soon finds himself at odds with the mysterious plainclothes police officer Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).
If that plotline raises hopes for a pulpy revenge tale, Refn through his directorial choices, dashes any expectations and crushes any hopes for Drive 2: Bangkok. While ardent fans of his previous works would expect Gosling to return as Refn’s near silent antihero, the magnificent Pansringarm embodies that role here. His Angel of Vengeance cuts through the film like Ledger’s Joker, a supernatural cop who inexplicably pulls a samurai sword (that would put Hattori Hanzo to shame) from his shoulder blades. His thematic relevance is not entirely subtle. Part religious icon and part manifestation of Julian’s subconscious, helping him deal with the consequences of the actions he must take as well as the pressure being placed on him by his psychopathic family, Pansringarm’s Chang simultaneously embodies fear, self-awareness and possible redemption for Gosling’s haunted avenger. Alongside Gosling, Pansringarm threatens to run away with the show. Sadly, they are the film’s only saving graces. Other characters, most notably Scott Thomas’s screeching, vulgar matriarch seems to have walked on set from a different film entirely. Her Crystal does not so much shock and offend as jar with the established tone.
How much of Only God Forgives is real is never made clear and therein lies the criticism that has been raised all the way since its disastrous Cannes premiere. Scenes of nightmares segue into scenes of visions that segue into drug-induced walks down dark corridors as Cliff Martinez’s synth keeps the hipsters in the audience happy. Refn’s style, so fresh and exciting in Drive, here is snarky and agonisingly slow, with Gosling’s awkward silences and blank stares into neon-tinged darkness at times bordering on parody. Having decided that eighteen lines of dialogue was too many for Gosling’s Driver, he cuts that amount in half for Julian. Each shot is set up with such precision and filmed with such digital clarity that while we must commend cinematographer Larry Smith (who worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut) we must condemn Refn for never letting us believe that we are not watching a movie. He almost seems to be challenging his critics to take him on, aware that he has the full backing of Movie Nerdom, loyalty usually reserved for the Joss Whedons and Rian Johnsons of the world.
Self-awareness can be a useful tool for a director, Tarantino has based his entire career on it, but it is crucial that a director is trying to say something behind all the gimmicks and it is crucial that there is an emotional core to latch on to (think of Django’s quest to free Broomhilda or Butch Coolidge’s dream of escaping the gangster lifestyle). Refn has no time for real emotions or plotlines, these would only distract from the beauty of each camera set-up. Only God Forgives could be a hallucinatory examination of guilt, family and one man’s inability to love (Julian’s infatuation with a Thai prostitute never comes close to the chemistry The Driver shared with Irene). On the other hand it could also be a beautifully shot perfume ad set in Bangkok.
