Denmark/Thailand
2*
Director:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter:
Nicolas Winding Refn
Director of Photography:
Larry Smith
Running time: 90 minutes
Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short film, Un chien andalou, is well-known for one good reason: In a close-up, it shows a human eye sliced by a razor.
In Only God Forgives, cult director Nicolas Winding Refn references this image — in full colour — at the climax of a scene that sees a man lose not only his eyes but also his ears, his arms and his legs as well, all in near-silence, except for the constant, piercing scream of the victim.
Despite a torrent of violence and most scenes bathed in deep red by either blood, red neon lights or both, Refn maintains a curious and alienating distance from his characters, which means we don’t much care for these individuals who are under constant threat of execution by the sadistic blade-wielding policeman Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).
Chang is one of two enigmatic central figures responsible for the many sordid incidents of blood loss. The other is Julian, a big drug smuggler in the Bangkok underworld, played by Ryan Gosling, who also starred in Refn’s widely beloved but overhyped Drive.
At the beginning of the film, Chang is called to the scene when a 16-year-old prostitute is found dead in Bangkok. For some inexplicable reason, her killer, an American named Billy, has decided it would be a good idea to stay behind. The girl’s father seeks revenge, and Chang allows the man to beat Billy to a lifeless pulp.
But then, suddenly, Chang turns on the father and pulls a sword from behind his back (which doesn’t, however, impede his ability to chase a criminal at full speed down the road in another scene later in the film) before slicing the man’s arm clean off.
It turns out Billy is Julian’s elder brother, and when Billy dies, their ice-cold mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) flies into town to demand justice be served.
These early scenes are soaked in red light, which would seem seedy if the visual metaphor of blood wasn’t so ridiculously obvious. The stone-faced Julian, who says little and expresses even less, is unwilling to avenge his brother until his mother forces action from him through emotional manipulation wrought by a personality verging on that of a dominatrix.
The film oozes with style, and the ambience of the opening act is electric thanks to the dozens of crimson-cloaked objects highlighted by the deep shadows that envelop them. There are hints of film noir, for example, the meshwork of shadows that outline the jasmine rays of neon as light is cast through a cement barrier, but without a narrator or a serious femme fatale, the film doesn’t take advantage of the genre.
As he did with Drive, Refn dedicates Only God Forgives to Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose El Topo and The Holy Mountain were Surrealist explorations of spirituality. Refn doesn’t do much with spirituality, but the surreal brutality of his work, amped up even from the grisly acts of Drive, is clearly a point that connects the two filmmakers.
A few moments in the film do stand out as particularly impressive. One is a scene in which Julian points a gun at the man who killed his brother, who emotionally confesses to the crime but does so in complete silence, as the music on the soundtrack is the only sound we hear.
Another scene of spectacular filmmaking is the big fight between the otherwise expressionless leads, Chang and Julian, which is accompanied by a Cliff Martinez composition that mixes music produced by an organ and a synthesizer. Unfortunately, Refn’s insistence on inserting multiple push-ins on a statue of a man fighting is as annoying as the statue is irrelevant.
While the images may suggest artifice, the characters are even worse, with barely a hint of an arc between them. Julian is calm and silent (Gosling has fewer than 10 lines of dialogue in the entire film), even though he is supposed to be an important figure in the drug trade. Crystal could potentially be a source of great amusement, as she verbally decimates an unsuspecting hotel receptionist upon her arrival in Bangkok, but she ultimately doesn’t push back against the dark lord of the narrative, police officer Chang.
Chang seems to be a villain of steel, who dodges bullets and fights like a god. He is simply invincible, and despite the single scene of him and his young, tender wife, we get absolutely no sense of his thinking and have no idea what drives him.
Refn’s visual creativity is not consistent, however, as is made obvious when some menacing characters, killers for hire, arrive on the scene in slow motion — which apparently somehow should accentuate their wickedness.
Only God Forgives tries to seem artistic by composing beautiful images and an interesting soundtrack that at times calls to mind the work of Ligeti, but its story verges on being one-dimensional, and it is difficult to care about any of the characters. It seems to enjoy the scenes of its own brutality, including when a long metal spike is pushed right through someone’s eardrum, but the film has no interest in presenting a story worthy of our attention.
This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.