Forgive Refn's Tresspasses

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Close your eyes and picture what David Lynch's Kickboxer would look like - that's what Nicolas Winding Refn obviously did when he set about making Only God Forgives. Only it's David Lynch's Kickboxer by way of Drive - picture Drive as a physical object, a stone sitting in a field in front of you, round and heavy. Only God Forgives is what you see when you roll it over (worms and mud that kibosh the sunlight) and climb underneath, and roll it back over yourself, slowly. Very slowly.

I think I keep telling you to close your eyes and picture things because the movie wants to get you under the same sort of spell - from its opening frames it is working overtime on mood mood mood. Does it work? Sometimes. I found it ponderous at first - stifling and inexplicable. It doesn't have any desire to let we the dreamers ease our eyes closed, fall asleep and slip into its rhythm - we're expected to enter the theater already inside a nightmare, I guess, or risk alienation. I was alienated. And I don't doubt Refn wanted to alienate me, but for good patches he was merely testing my patience.

Things liven up though, probably right around the time Kristin Scott Thomas waltzes in in tawdry Donatella drag, pinning extra-long cigarettes between her stick-insect fingernails and feigning half-assed motherly concern only when it suits her deliciously sinister impulses. You've seen the trailer, you know this is why you're here, and the movie knows it too... but not quite enough - everything is so weighted down that sometimes it feels as if KST's clawing at the sides of the film to keep herself and this bigger-than-everything bitch afloat.

And again, I suppose a drowning sensation is what Refn wanted to achieve - it's right there in the soundtrack of most dire thrums, a sink sinking sunk amalgamation of dirge-like electronic emphases overlaying every black on red on black image swirling around our attendant Ryan Gosling shaped cipher. And when Refn's onto something, it's something - it's an exquisite looking film, stupefyingly well shot. There's a super-violent scene (actually saw some people head for the exits during it) mid-way set in a karaoke club full of prom-dressed prostitutes that's simply a series of the most transfixing images you're gonna see all year. And yet...

... yet there it was again for me, that feeling that Refn wasn't quite earning his keep. Character inaction - so purposeful, so purposeful - kept edging towards empty posturing instead. I never quite got stuck in the molasses dipped mood, so I found myself struggling against it instead of just enjoying the ooze sucking up past my ankles. I'd have loved to have been sucked under, but mostly it just made me think I need a new pair of boots.

As an aside, that there above is a picture I personally took from the red carpet for the movie's premiere in Brooklyn last night - Gosling, Refn, KST, as well as Thai stars Vithaya Pansringarm and Yayaying Rhatha Phongam, were all there and did an introduction to the film and then a Q&A after. This was my second time seeing Refn speak in person and if you ever have the opportunity, grab it - he's every inch the devil you want him to be, strange and sly and adorably deranged. He got giddy time and again making Gosling and KST squirm - telling stories about intimate conversations he and Ryan have had about their penises, "as men do."

And much to my most effervescent delight there was an entire section of the Q&A devoted to Kristin Scott Thomas' delivery of The Line of the movie, specifically a dirty word that I won't share here - even though I want to shout the line from the rooftops and spin around a la The Sound of Music while doing so - because I don't want to ruin it for anybody. But it's the line I turned to my boyfriend and immediately quoted as soon as the film ended, and we laughed, oh how we laughed, and then they devoted a big chunk of the Q&A to that moment and I was so happy hearing KST talk about how she had to work with a dialect coach for the film and what a difficult time she had with just that one word and she refused to say the word on stage and it was all awesome. You'll know of what I speak once you see the movie. Classic. I doubt she wants to be tied to that word forever but I'd say she owns it now.
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