ONLY GOD FORGIVES

ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

It's like a multiple motorway collision seen in slow motion. What is happening is appalling. How it happens has a hideous, spellbinding grace. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is magisterially deranged. A Danish filmmaker already halfway to abstract expressionism (Valhalla Rising, Drive) now all but completes his journey. This Zen reverie of violence, virtually devoid of cogent narrative, has a western drug dealer in Bangkok (Ryan Gosling) going up against a brutalising black-clad cop (Vithaya Pansringarm), known to friends and foes as the Angel of Vengeance, who has abetted the murder of Gosling’s brother.

That brother has already beaten, raped and killed a prostitute in scene one. No one in this story is a sweetie pie. Perhaps that is its appalling appeal. The scenes march by, near-wordless tableaux drenched in red or gold, ablaze with street neon or jewelled with nightclub lights, sometimes punctuated by song – the cop takes the concept of “singing detective” to a new surreal level – and usually climaxing in an act of visceral, vivid violence.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not offering reverence. Part of the film’s spell is its close skirmishing with bad-in-all-senses art. A blonde-coiffed Kristin Scott Thomas, as Gosling’s avenger mum deplaned from America, is a hair away from hilarity. Comparing your sons’ cock sizes aloud to a prospective daughter-in-law in a posh restaurant is not the stuff of Aeschylus, even an Aeschylus dragged kicking and screaming to Thailand. Scott Thomas is so cast-against-type you admire her audacity. In her scarified pallor and bleached-pale hair she resembles Ingrid Thulin, Ingmar Bergman’s former muse of doom. Meanwhile her mannish walk and butch haute couture wardrobe say “Eff you” to memories of The English Patient, never mind Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Many characters get impaled in many ways: ways which, twice seen, will surely risk a hyperbole-induced giggle. But there are still seeds of seriousness in Only God Forgives: a sporadic beauty, like lightning flashes across oriental scroll paintings, and a laconic voltage in the life-or-death confrontations. Refn has at least set the bar high for his aesthetic future. After this, any Refn thriller will be some kind of event.

ft.com

Nigel Andrews

Source: FINANCIAL TIMES
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/6973a090-fa90-11e2-87b9-00144feabdc0.html