JamesF wrote:Refn's dedicating this (and Drive) to Alejandro Jodorowsky bugged me somewhat; for all their bloody violence and shock tactics, there's a real humour and whimsy to Jodo's films that Refn's self-important, super-serious fetishising shows no traces of.
A lot of people have mentioned this, and criticized Refn for it, but that strikes me as odd. Has a dedication ever been so closely scrutinized? What gives? It's not unlike Godard getting pissed at Tarantino back in the 90s for using A Band Apart as his production company - Tarantino is clearly not doing the same thing as Godard, and just as clearly, he is influenced by him. The same seems to be going on here. Refn is not making Jodorowsky films - he's just citing a major influence, a filmmaker whose work he admires.
I'm not trying to defend the film through that, it just seems a strange thing to dwell on.
That's nothing beside the furor that kicked up when one filmmaker dedicated a film to his mom. 'This isn't at all the kind of film she would've made!' they all said.
domino harvey wrote:There are many legitimate arenas to criticize this film, picking on the dedication strikes me as desperate behavior on the part of its detractors
Not if you consider that in making the dedication, Refn seems to be identifying someone he regards as a spiritual cohort. Because it implies that Refn doesn't recognize how little his film has to do with anything Jodorowsky created--Refn doesn't see that whatever inspiration he has derived from Jodorowsky doesn't make it onto the screen. One of my own feelings about the film is that it attempts a sort of symbolic journey without any intellectual depth, and in that sense, the dedication also seems cobbled together with a symbolic logic that has no provisional content.
People dedicate things to parents, siblings, spouses, pastors, teachers, mentors, ie. people who've had a significant impact on their lives. That's the most you can claim about Winding Refn's dedication, that it was to someone he felt had an impact on him. That's it. It's often a 'without which, not' statement.
Claiming anything more, like what Winding Refn is or is not capable of seeing regarding his inspiration, is daft and more than a little petty and uncharitable. It's also willful: you have to want it to be true. Winding Refn could've taken nothing more from Jodorowsky than the idea of going for broke and doing things your way, and this was what his dedication meant to him. If you can't explain why it isn't that, you can't claim your idea is true.
Jodorowsky is also mentioned in the Special Thanks credits (along with Gaspar Noé). So it's probably safe to say they have some sort of relationship, and that the dedication goes along with whatever that relationship entails rather than Jodorowsky's films in general.
Edit to add a tidbit that might shed some light. From The Playlist: "Refn explains how the hyper-expressive Jodorowsky is the one that gave Refn the courage to avoid the big blockbuster sinkhole. “I called Jodorowsky in Paris and he says to me, ‘What is this shit in Hollywood, why?’” Refn says, launching into an impassioned Jodo impersonation. “And I thought I was being yelled at! ‘You must not let your vision be destroyed!’ And I was like, I know, I know, I was wrong. ‘You have to stay true, or else I’ll not like you anymore!’ He’s like ninety, but he has the mind of a comet. So I said, I would like to do ‘The Incal,’ and he was like, ‘That… you will HAVE!’” Originally it seemed like Refn’s hopes for “The Incal” were merely a pipe dream, though he hints, “Actually it may happen faster than I anticipated.”"
Was at a Q&A with Refn prior to the release of Drive when he said that Noé consulted on the elevator scene to get the... effects... right, if you get my drift. So they may have needed his help with the hotel room in this one.
What a friggin' slow beautiful & stylish mess and waste of a film. What was Refn thinking? The emperor has no clothes. I came out feeling filthy. From "Drive" to this? Jeez! Poor Kirsten Scott Thomas ... why would she take a script where she has to talk about the cock sizes of her sons. Too embarrassing!
I didn't care for Drive back then but will revisit the film at some point. Only God Forgives, has the distinction of featuring great music, cinematography and fight/action choreography, and yet I found it utterly terrible. So much good in the service of so little. I like some ideas in the film (how it turns your expectations for Gosling's character on its head, and some of the silent passages were powerful) but the film exasperated me so much by the end, that its technical achievements amounted to nothing for me personally. I didn't find the violence shocking because there was nothing I could relate to, and Refn tries far too hard to be shocking (regarding the torture scene with the pin needles etc). If there is an award for the most beautiful and immaculate looking empty-headed piece of trash of the year, Only God Forgives gets my vote.
There are some amazing scenes in this film, especially those moments in the beginning just after the brother is killed and Julian has a kind of Lynchian corridor walk that turns into a kind of Gaspar Noe-style premonition of the death and his own end to come. The cop and Julian both seem to have a kind of strange psychic bond, existing on a different mental plane to all of the other characters in the film, and this is what inspires all of the hyper-stylised lighting (the film also reminds me a little of Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive, in its dualistic conflict that decimates everyone around them).
I also love the element of dialogue being frequently dropped out. I think this is Winding Refn showing that he acknowledges how familiar we all are with the tropes of crime dramas, the need to set up the hits on the police, the interrogations and so forth, and so can drop all the unnecessary talk and concentrate our eyes on the visuals. It reminds me of the experiments that Hitchcock did in Topaz, though pulled off much better here. I especially like the sequence after the café machine gunning where the dialogue and other 'human noises' are stripped away entirely but we still hear the foley track of running footsteps and objects in the world (building up to the sizziling oil in the pan), along with the almost subliminal heartbeat thud during the ensuing chase.
I thought this was a magnificent film: a revenge drama by way of an almost unbearably tense Lynchian fugue state nightmare, full of neon drenched, shadowy corridors (and it is a corridor film for the most part, full of frames within frames boxing the characters in, and more open, almost arena-style spaces saved for the most violent confrontations, physically or psychologically) and musical performances to sparse audiences (the central "want a fight?" scene can be equated to the karaoke numbers). It's a film where sexual urges are usually sublimated into violent ones. Where women have to be kept pure, unless they have become too masculine, in which case they have abdicated their right to femininity in some ways.
And the Jodorowsky dedication is perfectly apt, since this film plays like a gigantic personalised allegory full of meaning for the central character but unexpressed by him as he is driven by a kind of compulsion beyond himself, which he is powerless to control.
Talking of inarticulate, I think Drive might be throwing everyone off with regard to this film. Gosling in Drive is inarticulate and inexpressive in an entirely different way to in Only God Forgives! And I think it has to do with the way that in Drive he was playing the Shane-style impassive hero. In Only God Forgives he's playing a weakling, cowed by his mother and brother and almost abused into passivity and subservience who learns to rebel through inaction at the end. By not saving himself or his mother, he closes the circle of tit-for-tat vengeance that has only been growing wider and wider through the rest of the film.
In Drive Gosling was withdrawn but wanting to open up and finding it impossible to escape from his criminal world. He is the same here too but Julian isn't a 'purely' decent character in the way that the Driver was. He is a man who has always been a lapdog to his mother, to the extent of murdering his father on her orders before the film begins (this film is almost in the mode of a Jacobean tragedy). He appears to have always looked the other way to his brother's indiscretions, even though he kind of knows that what his brother does is fundamentally wrong, otherwise he would not have let the father of the girl his brother murdered go.
And most interestingly, I think that throughout the film he is most concerned about the violent tendencies within himself. That he is caught between wanting to do good and being tied to his violent, amoral family. The fundamental scene here is near the end where his mother talks of never being able to understand him, that he was different. She is kind of acknowledging his abberant spark of human decency that his older brother didn't have, which is why she preferred the older brother and is confused and angered by Julian.
Julian appears to be aware of and trying to fight against the violent and abusive tendencies which he feels seething within himself and sees fully expressed by his brother and mother (and the cop as the new father figure), especially whenever he gets aroused by the object of his desire, hence the strange, semi-bondage, semi-lapdance 'no touching' enforcement, dreamy sequence near the beginning of Julian having his hands tied to his chair, which itself is foreshadowing the final scene. Or the distance keeping from his girl, because the time that he does get close to her he puts her through the meal with his mother and then brutally demands the dress back from her once she has failed to impress.
I love the performance of the girlfriend in this scene, who is shocked and acquiesces, but still retains her own personality and individuality no matter how much the film, and the mother, tries to turn her into a poseable sex doll (as I would argue do all the other women in the world of the film in small but telling moments that Winding Refn gives them). Speaking of which the torture scene in the club is where the true parallel with Drive comes in, as that sequence is very like the hammer scene in the strip club from the earlier film. Except that all of the girls are less drugged out and topless gazing incuriously at the violence, but dressed up like dolls in frilly outfits and given the 'see no evil' instruction by the cop as he tortures one of the mother's henchmen, eventually crippling, blinding and deafening him in another example of highly stylised allegory (another Jacobean drama element!)
This is where the Jodorowsky element comes in, as the straightforward narrative that we've all seen the beats of done countless times before almost collapses (as in something like El Topo) and the film becomes both Oedipal (the mother embodying corruption, the polluting womb which was the source of all of the horror of this story) and Societal (the look towards the wider world to perform a kind of cleansing or purification of his 'evil' part for him).
That's why the fight sequence is less about spectacle and action and more about Julian doing his duty to his family but also masochistically wanting his bad side beaten out of him. To be punished for his part in his despicable family. It is why he gives up his arms in the final scene, to live but without the means to hurt others.
The troubling figure beyond Julian's story is that of the cop, the man who gets to exist outside the law and take matters into his own hands. Who gets to pass moral judgment on everyone else without ever taking responsibility for his part in the actions. Who sees the world as black and white, not grey with everyone having their reasons. The person who shows another hideous element of society by being able to take that God-like position of the title. He's spurred into relentless tracking and does not have to consider defusing any situation, or show any mercy, because he is righteous. He just has to finish it, whatever the outcome (with the suggestion that it is almost at the cost of his own daughter). Purity of purpose is perhaps the most disturbing trait of any character in a Winding Refn film, and the cop becomes the most frightening character here, and the one most like the Driver from Drive, just viewed from the perspective of those he is coming for.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Dec 02, 2013 10:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Never saw these responses at the time, but I thought this was worth revisiting.
mfunk9786 wrote:When someone dedicates their memoir to their one year old son, does someone say "But that kid can't write yet!"
Hm. I do see your point, but for me a question of taste does enter into dedications (was Godard's dedication to Monogram pictures not meant to be modest, fun and a little cheeky?), especially when they are made so prominent, in so self-consciously stylized a film.
For instance, if I dedicate my large, post-modern memoir to Marcel Proust, am I not inviting comparison?
feihong wrote:Never saw these responses at the time, but I thought this was worth revisiting.
mfunk9786 wrote:When someone dedicates their memoir to their one year old son, does someone say "But that kid can't write yet!"
Hm. I do see your point, but for me a question of taste does enter into dedications (was Godard's dedication to Monogram pictures not meant to be modest, fun and a little cheeky?), especially when they are made so prominent, in so self-consciously stylized a film.
For instance, if I dedicate my large, post-modern memoir to Marcel Proust, am I not inviting comparison?
I thought this film was really awful, but the Jodorowsky dedication doesn't seem terribly displaced, thematically (Masculinity, Mommy, Religion, etc...), if not in terms of execution. I guess it could have been just as easily dedicated to Fellini. I am fascinated that david h. derived some greater meaning from the goings on, but for me it was an empty exercise in calculated excess.
Back to the moral mess of Refn's Bleeder and the extreme aestheticism of his Fear X and Valhalla Rising. And yet part of the point would seem to be that this is an essentially amoral world of charged empty spaces, ready to be fitted with the decor of one's choosing and furnished with posturing stances. This particular posturing is the kind Refn employs to be both precise and diffuse; even as it allows for no degree of maneuverable room it underlines the stricture of that, its extreme, possibly self-imposed limitation. The broader space meanwhile suggests more than individual characters can ever let on. It's how he manages to get away with such a simple seeming story. Certainly much of his relentless style owes a lot to Kubrick and Lynch (and Thomas Clay's Soi Cowboy--I wonder what Nothing thought of this). But Refn has refined down his concoction of influences--even in Fear X this particular hothouse was his own. The concentration on notions of masculinity is nothing new for him and may seem easy or obvious but it's really anything but.
Refn is actually one of the very few directors working who takes "primitive" ideas seriously, as things which still define character in a fundamental sense and from which we cannot be so easily shaken free. We dismiss that consideration at our own risk. The scene in Drive where Gosling beats up the guy in front of the strippers still remains likely his best and most directly potent treatment of this theme: it's *obvious* as a conflation of sex and violence but what's missed is the impassivity of the strippers observing the beatdown. They are not impressed, they are not even affected. And here again we get Refn's unique take. The Sex and Violence are foundational, fundamental; they are a given and exist as a flat ground for further action, even rejection. In this new film the twist is Gosling as "quisling"; unable or unwilling to follow through with violence it may not even matter. He's emasculated either way in the face of this mythic primitivism. There is a certain camp quality in play too but it's integrated well; the film can accommodate it. Punishing then but among Refn's finest works.
An unexpected delight. I felt Drive was hypnotically cool yet didn't quite break free of its second-hand material, but Only God Forgives is such a pure, ineffable experience mostly untethered to traditional ideas of narrative and character that it doesn't matter for me whether it apes Lynch or Jodorowsky or Melville (actually, I think the film is more tonally unique than has been given credit for): I'm content enough to bathe in the opiated, womb-like glow of its ominous yet primordially familiar neon-drenched corridors.
David hare is right on (if a bit hyperbolic) regarding Refn's command of mise en scene; the film's composed and edited with such fluidity that it felt for me much shorter than its already brief running time (and what do you know, the "most helpful" IMDb review complains that its 90 minutes felt more like several hours!) Nearly every frame is art-installation-level Beautiful; I don't think this detracts, but fits perfectly, because this is a film so obviously in love with and aware of surface and pure aesthetics. In many ways, this is one of those films that's nigh-impossible to articulate a solid defense of, at least for me, because it's affecting on such a subconscious, subjective level that I could most crudely boil down to: "I like the pretty colors!" But it's more than that. It's the Oedipal framework of the thing, the sparse cast of characters giving it a symbolic feel as if all a myth or dream taking place within the confines of a neurotic mind (in this regard, note the abundance of corridors, hallways, doorways, boxes, frames-within-frames galore...) Simply put, it's a hypnotic, dazzling eye-gasm of a film, and while I would not claim it has the emotional or intellectual oomph of any all-time great, it's some kind of intoxicating formal masterpiece nonetheless.
Oh, and Kristin Scott Thomas stole the film, absolutely. She projects a perfect balance of weathered sensuality and odious, incestual psychopathology; you can practically smell the cigarette smoke and feel her leathery skin through the screen. I was hypnotized by her every appearance, hanging on every wicked word and gesture. Surely one of the most impactful performances by an actress in recent years. Ultimately it's Thomas' audacious ice queen along with the visions of Larry Smith and Refn that most make this film the perverse pleasure it is.
All these glowing reviews leave me slack-jawed in amazement and almost make me want to see this film again. Almost.
I liked Valhalla Rising and I loved Drive but Only God Forgives was so unremittingly dreadful that I began to question why I liked Refn's earlier films.
And I don't get the David Lynch comparisons at all.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been fascinated by why I had such a positive response to Only God Forgives and such a negative one to Gaspar Noé 's Enter The Void. The films are kind of alike in a number of ways: a twisted family love story set against hyper-stylised Asian backdrops that suggest how out of place the characters are; a focus on nightclubs and corridors; an opening scene of a premonition of death (the drug trip scene against the dark corridor one); the blank, almost empty characters for the audience to project onto.
And I think the difference lies mostly in the approach by the filmmakers. There is the modulation of the narrative of Only God Forgives by Refn in order to comment on the characters and their relationships by how he frames and shoots them, what he cuts to, how he frames, what small moments he is emphasising. While the characters may be blank and impassive, Refn and the film itself is kind of 'outside' of them, creating a narrative that isn't really allied to any particular character within the film itself.
It is a more classical way of presenting the narrative than Noé 's more radical, and more problematic, Enter The Void. The best way I could describe Enter The Void's presentation is as being very similar to that of a computer game presented through the eyes of a single character throughout, despite changes from first person 'seeing the world through the characters' to camera angles slightly from behind the character's head looking past them (with either POV being an option in many games), to God-game like high up 'floating above the city and then diving into individual building' angles. The area where that comparison falls down is that in video games you the audience member are meant to be interacting and experiencing the narrative for yourself, placing yourself in the eyes of the protagonist, whereas in Enter The Void there is actually a main character there whose journey is being followed, yet the way that the film is telling the story is making it impossible to know whether you as the audience are understanding his journey in the way he is, or even if the character is actually thinking at all in his journey through death back to life again.
The character is just as blank and impassive as Gosling's in Only God Forgives (more so, since there is more to read into Julian in Refn's film), yet Noé is tied to that character's perspective in a more problematic way than Refn was to his. Only God Forgives is in a more classical style, yet in a strange way Noé's 'liberation' from conventional filmmaking techniques has tied him to a single perspective that can never be stepped out of (even if it is viewed from slightly different detachments) and to a single-shot camera that cannot just cut anywhere but has to spend a large portion of the film on the logistical problem of just traversing space to get from one scene to the next. It also prevents Noé from taking a more dispassionate 'judgmental' approach to his characters and their world and maybe adding comments or ideas on a layer 'above' the actions occurring in the narrative itself. Enter The Void ends up becoming a more experiential, rather than analytical experience therefore, which is more problematic without strong characters or directorial touches, to guide the experience.
i like Gosling but his character in this feels like a parody of his already stylized character in Drive. if it weren't for that, i feel like this movie might be a winner. there are some eye-rolling moments with how into himself as an artist Refn seems to be, but i think the technical aspects of the film from composition and lighting to editing and score are all fantastic and Kristin Scott Thomas does a great job with a cartoonishly hateful character. but you basically don't care about anything that happens to the Gos' protagonist so it's difficult to have any reaction to the film other than a cerebral appreciation of its execution and visceral aspects without actually having a visceral response to it. still on my top ten of the year so far, though.
My first impression was that despite their being any number of admirable qualities about it, it wasn't something I felt had an urgent re-watchability factor like Drive does (for me anyway). Quite bleak for my taste generally, but it's definitely not a step down from Drive. Certainly one up from Bronson, the only other movie of Refn's I'd seen and immediately was turned off by.
