Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013)

[Reeniop41]

You really need to watch this gem of a film several times to unlock its Freudian undertones. This may be a future Criterion release I think as Refn's Top 10 Criterion list was featured right before the US release. Can't get that final song out of my mind which is also the last track on the CD soundtrack! Watched it on big screen and purchased it on Vudu HDX and I found the home theater more satisfying due to great visual (HDX) and auditory experience (7.1)! Lots of divide amongst reviewers but it will come down to your own personal experience.

[domino harvey]

Yeah, Kristin Scott Thomas talking about the size of her sons' dicks takes so many viewings to decipher

[wigwam]

Maybe it does on Vudu HDX, dom [-X probably a really shitty product

[AlexHansen]

Here's a little tidbit I wrote up after watching over the weekend. It's as awful as people have said, and as good as people have said. One of those films where all descriptions and assessments are equally valid. While I find it fascinating, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying it's "good".

The Refn/Gosling collaborations are extensions, and a division, of the film that brought him back from the cinematic hinterlands, Bronson. While the main character’s inability to connect distorts it a bit, Drive occupies at least some version of reality. It’s populated by people and emotion. Only God Forgives belongs to the same world that houses the cells and lockups that serve as Bronson’s stage. Gosling’s Julian doesn’t fit into the world as comfortably as Bronson (who inhabits this land with relish), but he’s accepted his place in a purgatory of doorways and hallways. The link to Bronson is established early, with shots of Julian balling his fists and raising them into a fighting stance crosscut with Chang locking Billy into the crime scene with the father of his victim specifically the sound of the door closing. The sound and the fury.

[R0lf]

ONLY GOD FORGIVES taught me that Thai people love their English (Osborne & Little) wallpaper.

[phantomforce]

This was one of those films I was really anxious to see that let me down so much. I had read the initial reviews and comparisons to Valhalla Rising, which I thought was great, and figured most of the negative reviews were people that just didn't have the patience to sit through something like this.

I feel like everyone is trying to make this movie into something it's not. Reading way too much into details that may or not be even be there, but who cares? The characters are awful people, not one person has any redeemable qualities.

The soundtrack is fine, the visuals are fine, but thats about it. I think for me the nail in the coffin was seeing the

Spoiler

dedication to jodorowsky

at the very end. I mean, fuck off, seriously.

I'm still a Refn fan, but he needs to stop trying so hard.

[Iamhere]

Here is an analysis of the film by Izzo describing the notion of it being related to Kierkegaard's philosophy. http://www.jeremyizzo.com/only-god-forgives" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's a long and great read and its nice to see something intelligent about it that isn't just a review, however the problem is is that it's less shocking of an analysis (in my opinion) because Refn is an interesting director in the sense that he has no issue describing what his films mean. I've seen multiple interviews when he mentions the ideas of existentialism, how Chang is God, the struggle of faith, and the use of sex as violence and violence as sex. However it's a good read. And i loved the film. I was upset that I had to watch it on my computer because I couldn't find a theater.

Refn perhaps talks about his art because he's an egotistic pretentious artist...and wants to be seen as one. I don't mind. I think it's great that people are talking about a foreign artist in cinema. I love all his films and can't wait for the next.

[criterion10]

If there's one film this year that I don't think I'll ever be able to determine exactly how I feel about it, this is the one. I was lucky enough to see this on the big screen today (well, yesterday now, considering it's after midnight).

On the surface, the film is stunning. The cinematography by Larry Smith yields to some of the most remarkable visuals I have seen in any film, and the score by Cliff Martinez ranks among his best works.

Though beneath that, I'm not sure that there is anything else to this film. Refn is obviously a director with an original voice and style, though the truth is, other than Drive, I haven't really been a fan of his other films. (If I had to rank: Drive, Only God Forgives, Fear X, Bronson, and Valhalla Rising (the latter which was terrible).)

For all the great atmosphere and mood he is able to create, Refn loses out on creating great characters, which is a shame, considering that Kristin Scott Thomas' character was interesting, though her cruel nature came off as being very comical and childish to me.

Gosling staring off into the distance blankly also became tiresome, and I can't help but wonder how this film would have been different if Refn managed to turn this character into something more than just a surface display.

There's certainly the theme of Oedipus running throughout the film. I would actually look at the film as retelling of the Oedipus story.

I also thought that the film's ending went on for way too long, after the climactic fight sequence, which was great indeed. I do love that final shot, however.

There are certainly some interesting things, deeper thematic layers to dissect in the film. I'd be interested in discussing them with anyone else on here, although I'm tired now and headed to bed.

[Dylan]

The only mild problem I had with this film, which I liked very much indeed, was

Spoiler

how much the cop singing karaoke to the mannequin-like audience seemed like an obvious rip-off of Dean Stockwell singing "In Dreams" as a blank audience looks on in Blue Velvet. This sort of Faux Lynchian thing is also in Buffalo '66, where the father sang with a spotlight on him before Ricci. Its been in other movies, too, and it always takes me out. Speaking of Lynch, his influence is also felt in the sound design of Only God Forgives, but I thought all of that worked.

Beyond that, everything else was fascinating and I found the film as a whole very chilling and nightmarish. Every single shot is supremely gorgeous.

[feihong]

The film reminded me again and again of a movie from the 90s called Trigger Happy (when I saw it in a theater it was called Mad Dog Time, and it was later renamed for home-video release). That was a film in which Richard Dreyfuss played God (I believe his character name is "Vic," though), and Jeff Goldblum was his hitman, a very clear grim reaper analogue. Diane Lane, if I remember right, plays God's girlfriend, whose name is, somewhat predictably, "Grace." It was directed by the son of Joey Bishop, and so the film was full of cameos by movie stars big and small, from Burt Reynolds to Kyle Mclachlan, Gabriel Byrne to Billy Idol. Goldblum spent most of the movie mincing around a cocktail bar and occasionally fighting a duel with one luckless challenger after another (strangely, they dueled by drawing revolvers from the drawers of boardroom desks). Who could defeat death, after all?

As an atheist, there's not much to admire in either movie, and there's not much to occupy one's time. I like my existentialism as much as the next guy. The film looked good and sounded great. But it's a movie composed of symbols, without containing any inner life. No one in the film exists beyond their existential/symbolic cipher. The film has no sustaining corporeal logic. If Gosling's family is essentially a local drug cartel (there's lots of evidence; they have their own whole set of local thugs they move around the board, for one thing), why can this cop just go around torturing and killing them with impunity? Doesn't somebody get kickbacks to stop this kind of violence from constantly interfering with the drug business? It seems to me this policeman would be stepping on someone's toes--but the policeman doesn't seem to have superiors that he reports to or answers to. How does the prostitute Gosling hangs out with not know that he's a drug dealer? Why does Gosling's brother decide this one night that he will (evidently for the first time) rape an underage girl or murder one that's of age? Why does the cop opt immediately for a vigilante form of justice? None of this stuff matters in the movie, because there aren't any story mechanics at work under the layer of symbolism which is the movie's primary operating mode.

As a result, the deafening silence of the film's principal characters carries no special weight or meaning. The characters don't have genuine, changeable psychology (when does the cop ever doubt or change his mind?), which might provide us with some ambiguous meanings for the silence. Only Gosling has any kind of thought process, but Refn perversely denies us access to Gosling's thoughts by burying Gosling's primary motivating factor in the film

Spoiler

(that he lives in guilt over being pressured into murdering his father--which, given how ridiculous Kristin Scott Thomas is in the film, comes off as an unbelievable premise in the first place)

to the extent that we don't realize this inner character pathology exists in the Gosling character until the film is nearly over.

I guess the Jodorowsky acknowledgement in the ending credits (which appears twice, even), is maybe a nod to Santa Sangre? A film from which Refn has extracted so much material, to be repurposed for his own use. So Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mother demanding the use of her son's hands to enact vengeance. Certainly that film is full of visionary symbolism, and a lot of it is religious in origin (though Jodorowsky never uses just one religious paradigm as the source for all his references--he is far too worldly to force such a heavy read on his picture as Refn seems to want for his own movie). But Santa Sangre has two extraordinary advantages over Only God Forgives--humor and ambiguity. The visual symbolism in Jodorowsky is surreal, and it doesn't usually require a definitive interpretation--and unlike Refn, Jodorowsky usually doesn't supply one. And the humor, the incredible darting between deadpan strange, goofy miming, winking lewdness and theatrical trickery gives Jodorowsky's films a lively, restless energy that makes the films generally extremely interesting. Humor is not Refn's to command. The enormously disturbing karaoke scenes that punctuate vicious killings and tortures in Only God Forgives are rendered as if they might be intent on provoking a sort of tongue-in-cheek grin on the part of hipper audience members. What's most odious is how Refn glides over the question of whether the subordinate cops are being forced to watch these grotesque displays. This lays bare the even more troubling question of why this absurdly moralistic cop is Refn's analogue for God or death in the first place.

Both Drive and this movie have managed, though, to deepen my appreciation for the gangster movies of Jean-Pierre Melville (it does seem to me as if Drive's most demonstrative precedent is Le Samourai, and maybe that great film should serve here as a barometer of Refn's own success or failure). Because Melville did this kind of poker-faced movie, filled with overtly arch design sensibility, deliberate pacing, images nearly frozen in their perfection and thorough existential symbolism--only his movies managed to be lively, bracing, and wholly absorbing, while Refn's movies come off as simplistic and heavy-handed put side by side with the work of an obvious source of inspiration. Is it because Melville's movies were preoccupied with the practice of thievery in its myriad techniques, forms and accompanying lifestyles, and that they wore their existential symbolism rather lightly? Felix's hat in Army of Shadows is a source of strong visual symbolism many times within the movie (though it doesn't stand for the same thing every time we see the hat), but the image and its symbolic life aren't overwhelming to the viewer. The hat's meanings and reads are not exclusive, but open to interpretation. And Refn doesn't seem to be able to envision a movie in which the symbols are open and changeable. So the film is a heavy-handed failure for me, but it does deepen my respect for Melville, who did what Refn wants to do a long time ago and did it right, as well as deepening my love of Jodorowky, who as a filmmaker has all the human vitality which Refn determinedly lacks.

There are a lot more blatant rips of scenes from other movies which run throughout Only God Forgives--like the scene of the cop practicing swordplay a la Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, or the fairly clear ways in which Kristin Scott Thomas' arrival in the film mirrors the arrival of Ben Kingsley in Spain in Sexy Beast--and as these "borrowed" scenes occur to me they contribute to my general sense that this movie is quite a failure, through and through. Truffaut and Godard borrowed a great deal from other film and pop culture, but it was always clear that those two filmmakers were drawing conscious parallels rather than just outright stealing. I don't feel like Refn has the same level of control over his picture as any of those great filmmakers, and his results feel very, very hollow for me.

[Iamhere]

All these reasons are what make me like the film. It's bold that he chose not to structure a regular plot but have a film full of ideas and symbols colliding. very ambitions. and to put it in his words..."it penetrates." it's so true...this is one film that you can have a conversation about afterwards.

I feel that refns use of women,mostly in this film is very Augustinian, as if they cause all the doom...that gets old but here it makes sense, so i'll let it go.

I love Bleeder and Bronson...and i think Drive is a masterpiece. Drive is the best story about story telling. and the best film for this generation. Only God Forgives i think establishes refn as an artist. If someone is an atheist i still think there is much to get out. Everyone has moral conflicts within and need to decided right from wrong and what they deserve.

[FakeBonanza]

A lot of people have said a lot of different things about Only God Forgives, and I think that the variety of intense reactions are indicative of some level of achievement. For the most part, I wouldn’t argue with any of it; the narrative is loose enough that the film can be interpreted and evaluated any number of ways. The one label that I do take issue with is nihilistic, as I think this film is very much about morality and justice, and ultimately, almost achieves in communicating Julian’s redemption.

This is a film whose protagonist is literally and metaphorically impotent. For a drug dealer, Julian is constantly grappling with his own sense of morality, but is unable to act on it. The only instance in which he can enact judgment is by omitting an act of violence (when he chooses not to kill his brother’s murder). This is in contrast to Chang, who achieves justice through action.

Within the film’s world, Chang is a god. We glimpse the kickboxers encircling him and bowing, and officers of the police force watch his karaoke performances as if in worship. Midway through the film, Chang passes judgment over Julian and, contrary to Julian’s own visions, absolves him of punishment. This only complicates Julian’s struggle between his inner morality and the demands of his domineering mother. This leads to Julian’s attempt to achieve a sort of release through the central fight sequence, the outcome of which Julian almost certainly expected.

Having been touched by god, we do see Julian act on his own moral judgment in the scene at Chang’s house. In this scene, we also see Julian attempt to “become” Chang; however, it is the subsequent scene that I found most troubling, and was the point when Winding Refn lost me:

Spoiler

When Julian arrives to find his mother dead, I initially expected the desecration of her corpse to be only an act of him “re-killing” her. Having realized his moral judgment at Chang’s house, he returns home to murder his mother and free himself of her control, only to find her already murdered by Chang. Unable to fulfill his destiny, I hoped he would then attempt, in vain, to re-enact Chang’s murder of her.

Unfortunately, Winding Refn instead decides to fulfill the oedipal proficy, despite the fact that this is inconsistent with the suggested arc of the character. Instead of using the opportunity to affirm Julian’s morality, he does the opposite by instead reaffirming his mother’s rambling pleas to Chang (that Julian himself was jealous her relationship with Billy, etc.).

Whether this is Winding Refn intentionally subverting the character arc or not, I think it is a crucial mistake.

Beyond this, my only other issue with the narrative is that it was missing two or three dialogue scenes. There is much talk about the antagonistic relationship between Julian and Billy, and I think the film would have done better to show us this by, for instance, extending the one early scene in which the two brothers do interact. I also think it would have been beneficial to have one additional fully realized dialogue scene, similar to the dinner with Julian, his mother, and Mai. The friend I watched the film with argued that a more in depth expositional scene with Chang would have gone a long way, but I’m not sure that is necessary for his character.

Technically, this film is a marvel. Larry Smith’s cinematography is a revelation and Cliff Martinez outdoes himself, even surpassing his score for Drive (and his overlooked masterpiece, Traffic). Every shot in the film is very deliberately staged—and I mean staged. There is a lot of movement in the film, and a lot of camera movement, but there are just as many tableau-like scenes, such as the scene in which Julian meets his mother, and the karaoke scenes. In these sequences, characters are very still and very much posed. These contribute very much to the film’s surreal mood (very Lynchian, IMO).

As often as the Smith and Winding Refn evoke blacks and deep reds, some of my favourite sequences, compositionally, take place in more realistic settings (and during the day!): Julian and his crew’s confrontation with Billy’s murderer (including the exterior scene prior to his arrival), and the scene at Chang’s house near the end of the film.

I do not think that the film is ultimately successful on a narrative level, but, as in the case of To the Wonder, this does not disrupt the cinematic experience. I think that Only God Forgives is an ambitious film—certainly more ambitious than Drive—but where Drive succeeds in fully realizing it’s concepts, Only God Forgives fails. Even so, I would gladly invite such a spectacular failure over something conventional and less ambitious; I’m certainly glad it was not, for instance, Drive Redux. Only God Forgives alternately gives us Winding Refn at both his best and most indulgent. Despite it’s flaws, t has remained in my mind all day. I do think that it’s a rich film, and can’t help but wonder whether this will be a film that critics reevaluate in the future.

[domino harvey]

A lot of people have said a lot of different things about Only God Forgives, and I think that the variety of intense reactions are indicative of some level of achievement.

No, it is not, and apologists for this and any film need to stop thinking that a variety of critical responses is equatable with instant art. Provocation is not synonymous with having a multifaceted value. Many of the negative criticisms, which do not constitute a mere whisper, explicitly decry the film as empty or some variation thereof, a claim hard to pare from "some level of achievement," unless zero is the same as any other number now

[Black Hat]

How many other films does Ryan Gosling have coming out this year? Between this and The Place Beyond The Pines he might be able to set a modern day record for most terrible, absolute abominations to the art form in one year. Like Gaspar Noe's soulless, empty headed movies this was an exercise of who cares about a script? Lets throw a bunch of shit on the screen and have fun with different colored lights to make it look cool. This approach doesn't make a good movie it makes for a Bjork video without its best part, Bjork.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, why does this thread seem to have only people who think this movie is the most powerful (if flawed) artistic work of the year and people who think it's an abomination before the Lord? It didn't seem like it inspired that much feeling in either direction, to me.

[mfunk9786]

Some of the forced positive (and forced negative) reactions to this film is making it harder and harder to like. Guys, this isn't a jaw dropping masterpiece or a jaw breaking abomination to the artform. It just isn't.

EDIT: Matrix - great minds, etc

[matrixschmatrix]

Wow, even down to both using the term 'abomination', that's weird

[domino harvey]

Should have gone with ab-domination cuz Gosling is tha sex

[jindianajonz]

Wow, even down to both using the term 'abomination', that's weird

Well, the guy before you two did say both of Goslin's 2013 films were abominations.

I thought this film was pretty good. Beautiful shots, but on the car ride home with friends (who ironically hated it but still wanted to dissect it) I didn't really feel like I had too much to say about it.

[Black Hat]

Any movie where you can say substituting Jean Claude Van Damme for the lead actor would make for a better movie is a terrible movie.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well you can say that about literally any movie, it's only an issue if it's accurate

Also, I think Vampyr probably would have been better with JCVD in the lead.

[Black Hat]

One other thing did anybody see Chantal Akerman's Almayer's Folly? Refn clearly nabbed a few ideas from that film as well.

[mfunk9786]

But the idea here is that Gosling's character only seems like a tough guy. Not that there's a ton of nuance to the performance, but do you really think that someone like JCVD could have pulled off that sort of childishness?

[domino harvey]

JCVD in Kristin Scott Thomas' role, however...

[Black Hat]

Without a doubt for I don't see Gosling 'pulling off' anything in any of his roles. The guy basically plays a tree trunk of a different size in all of his films. At least Van Damme has a tiny bit of charisma and would more importantly send this film directly to home video where it belongs instead of your local repertory theater.