The Neon Demon (2016)

The Neon Demon (R)

"..treats objects like women, man."

It's a story as old as Los Angeles itself, a young girl looking for fame and fortune, innocent to the world, runs into the dark belly of the entertainment industry (LITERALLY!) in Director Nicholas Winding Refn's (Drive) gorgeously weird film, The Neon Demon.

Stunning cinematography, beautifully dangerous hellcat women, electro-smoky pulsing soundtrack, stilted Kubrick-like dialog, strange symbols and visions, and that one scene: Oh, that show stopping Scene!  They all make up the brunt of Refn's attack on the fashion industry, that it exists and how it cannibalizes (heh) the female form.  Early on, Elle Fanning's Jesse, the young lovely but impressionable youth who is the star of the film, is told "to always say she is 19.  18 is too on the nose."  This is shorthand for her situation, shorthand for the entire enterprise of film and subject.  She is quickly embraced by the industry's entrepreneurs, drunk in by the male gaze, and vilified by it's older, less natural looking models.  Even her new friend Ruby (Jena Malone) seems to have a strange fascination with Jesse, who soon gets caught up in her own hype and gets led down a dark walkway of doom.

Special attention must be made to the soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, once again joining Refn after scoring Drive.  Easily half of this film's enjoyment can be derived from the musical landscape of electronic moods, from 80s synth to edgy Pop Diva.  It matches all the gore and glitter perfectly and the film uses it extremely effectively.  Many will rewatch the film just as a means to experience the sweet dark marriage of visuals and sound.  The use of light, the shadowy early hours, the flash bulbs and mirrors, the cinematography is just as nuanced and beautiful as the audio and constructs a nightmare world of gloss and reflection for us to watch Jesse lose herself in.

ND will be too slow for many, too little viscera for others, the third act too toe-curling intense for anyone sane.  But for some the experience of wallowing through this blood bath will be sublime.  Slow, brooding and methodical, The Neon Demon mystifies for a long period and then suddenly drives it's point home with a pair scissors.  It's almost a twisted giallo mashup, like Diana Ross' Mahogany remixed by Dario Argento.  This is Refn at his most feminist, the men in the film treat women as mere meat puppets for their cameras, and the ones that don't the women themselves push away (Keanu Reeves himself has a small yet significant part).  The expected fashion cat fights, the women infighting by snidely brutalizing each other, these eye rolling cliches all happen.  But there is a deeper layer to it, and once that layer gets scratched and bleeds all hell breaks loose.  It's Refn's interest in not exploiting the women on screen who are being exploited that makes his intentions very clear, so beautifully on the nose it cuts it off to spite it face artistically.

8.5 You'll Never Look at Funeral Homes the Same Way Again out of 10 (GREAT)

Only God Forgives (2013)

Only God Forgives (R) - Review

"You wanna fight?"

A quiet man's brother is killed in Thailand after a run in with a local Police hero.  The disturbing crimes the brother committed justified his slaying in everyone's eyes except their mother, a brutally crass matron of crime.  When her other hitmen fail to extract revenge upon the stoic Cop, she cajoles her youngest son, the quiet man, to avenge the family and protect his own mother from the violence of Thai justice.

Director Nicolas Wendring Refn (Drive) pieces together an almost non narrative film here, less mainstream and much more surreal and violent than his previous hit.  There were glimpses of this in Drive, his first real attempt at reaching an American audience without sacrificing his aesthetic.  Here, the dark neon alleys, wall patterns, tiles and flowers illustrate Thailand beautifully, a twilight of modern neon at night, a bambooed rusticity during the day.  The soundtrack moodily drives the rage, while the characters do not.  Indeed, almost the entirety of the cast goes through the entire picture without moving a face muscle.  One expression is to be found, like models in a magazine ad.  The movie goes by like stills in a movie book, beautiful yet static, a picturebook flipping by.  Interesting as it is, it frustrates in equal measure, a bloody revenge picture devoid of emotion.

Long segments of time are spent on eyes and faces, unchanging and unflinching.  The lack of dialogue (Thai or English) comes to the forefront, and yet the over expressiveness of a silent picture is removed. Ryan Gosling is reunited with Refn here in almost a repeat of his unblinking character from Drive.  Yet instead of a professional with heart of gold here he is a quiet fighter with mommy issues (almost Hamlet's equal in violence, self doubt and psychological complexes).  The mother is the most expressive, swearing and flexing her strong Oedipus' issues as she screams for revenge.  There are sequences in a red room straight from Lynch's Twin Peaks, they all can't be fantasy sequences.  The stoic Police Captain is a surrogate father figure for Ryan (Gosling's real father, we are told, was murdered by him at the request of his mother), worshipped by his men who often are enraptured by their Chief's stunning Karaoke performances, helping him deliver cruel yet fair punishments to foreigners and locals alike, as untouchable in the ring as on the street (as anyone who crosses him finds).

The movie is an unflinching art house canvas that has been painted with vivid arterial sprays by a steady hand at the veins, but being almost devoid of narrative or depth, it becomes simply an exercise in style over substance, part fashion magazine part noir pulp dime novel. These actors are mannequins that move yet do not emote, placed into pretty situations (a karaoke bar, a torture scene in a perverted doll house, back alley restaurants filled with boiling frying pans) by a fetishistic visualist and then photographed simply for his own thrill, not the audience's yet still somehow unforgettable.

5.5 Bowls of Knives out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)

Fear X (2003)

Fear X (PG-13) - Review

"X marks the Spot"

Danish Director Nicolas Winding Refn's (Drive) first foray into American cinema was the 2003 mystery film Fear X, a brooding yet unsatisfying tale of obsession and blood told with a truly terse style and steady hand yet rejected by the majority of the public as it showcased two of Refn's favorite genres, surrealism and the art house film's nihilism towards standard plotting.

Leading the cast is the ramrod mall cop Harry (John Turtorro), who's wife murder he is slavishly investigating.  Harry watches the surveillance tapes obsessively, looking for every possible clue in the low-resolution vhs dubs, scans the halls of commerce for familiar faces and motivations, and ultimately leads him (maybe) to the conspiracy of his wife's death.  The overwhelming sense of dread and discovery to the film is wonderful, tracking Harry through this adventure is a nail pulling experience, and many who lived through that tale are put off by its art-house vagueness of its ending, where it is up to the home viewer to decide what happened and why.  It does come as a shock since much of it's first hour is delivered as a fairly standard detective story, but the severe surrealism, dream sequences and shock lighting schemes should serve as a clue to it's eventual arty crash of traditional narrative.

Showing signs of the genius and unconventional voice of Refn's style (X is an obvious precursor to his later Only God Forgives, both in construction and audience acceptance), the director borrows liberally from Kubrick's The Shining and Lynch's Blue Velvet mixed with Coen's Fargo to carve out his own niche in film oddities for his US debut.  It works, it gets under your skin and rattles your cage, but perhaps it being neutered with a lukewarm PG-13 and a unnaturally vague ending (further frustrating the viewer is that the surrounding characters are discussing what happened and what it means and yet we cannot hear them), Fear X is more of a film-theory than a full-fledged film experiment.  Results will vary, but the side effects may be worth it.

6 "Undecipherable visual montages to transition your film ending are soooo 2001:ASO, Refn" out of 10 (GOOD)