When Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling’s Only God Forgives premiered
at Cannes in May, there was a chorus of booing followed by pans. Having
seen the film and thinking about what critics and audiences were
expecting from it, I can see why. But I also ravenously luxuriated in
it, my eyes infatuated with its languid rhythm and saturated images, my
ears adoring its ambient textures and stretched silences. Greased with
Cliff Martinez’s silky synth score, it’s a film in which one alertly
bathes as it massages the senses. In alignment with its strained
Oedipal themes, where a muted son has to sever himself from a crassly verbose mother, the fleshy warm glow is womb-like.
Two years earlier, the pair’s first collaboration Drive
won Refn a directing prize at Cannes. Though not a hit, it was well on
its way to becoming a cult film. But the less-than-welcoming reception
for the follow-up was imminent. Drive has its fair share of intelligent cinephile detractors
(Quentin Tarantino said of it, “Nice try”) just as it had disappointed
mainstream audience members not expecting the slow-burn urban fairy tale
when the trailer (apparently) promised a Fast and Furious-tempered
action vehicle. Gosling, meanwhile, has been caught in a handsome
stoicism that is increasingly grating: looking at you quietly, talking
gently with the ghost of a smile, and then punching people in the teeth
(after Drive, think of Gangster Squad, The Place Beyond the Pines). Only God Forgives
feeds into this tiresome Gosling type. His character, Julian, runs a
boxing club in Thailand that fronts for a drug business controlled by
his family, including older and more assured brother Billy (Tom Burke)
and mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas). Julian wordlessly stares
while his mouth lingers in shadows. Calm, silent, gazing, beautiful,
chaste–this is very much like the Driver relocated to Thailand.
Refn’s new film isn’t as accessible as his previous one. With Drive, audiences
could be fascinated and puzzled with the enigmatic Driver, but in ways
relate — or at least be comfortable with — the familiar noir types in
Hossein Amini’s screenplay like Carey Mulligan’s single mom, Albert
Brooks’ delightful and lethal gangster Bernie Rose, Bryan Cranston’s
crippled mechanic, Oscar Isaac’s ex-con struggling to go straight, and
even Ron Perlman’s despicable and vulgar “Fine Ass Pussymobile” bully.
The beautiful contemporary synth-pop soundtrack plugs into the story’s
romanticism as it flirts with an attractive filmic iconography preceding
it, of Western heroes like Shane, Kenneth Anger’s leather/cars/pop fetish fest Scorpio Rising, Melville’s Le Samourai, and the glitzy sheen of ’80s B-movies.
All that made Drive a richer experience, as Refn, working on
assignment, was like an alien making the familiar L.A. terrain seem
startlingly new. It was a fairy tale and super-hero movie, and its
off-beat pathological longing left the ultraviolence (which only figures
into the picture at about the 45-minute mark) as a problematic
afterthought. The Driver’s protective vengeance might have been seen as
sleek noir posturing and flexing, but I felt that this character
resembled the titular character (Ryan O’Neal) from Walter Hill’s The Driver or one of Jean-Pierre Melville’s or Michael Mann’s criminal loners (James Caan in Thief, Robert De Niro in Heat) less than Mann’s scoptophiliac killer Francis Dollarhyde from Manhunter.
That sense of pathology made the picture feel more fantastic and
twisted in its solipsism, in addition to being more tragic. Gosling’s
bouts of rage stemmed more from a frustrated–and even psychopathic–sense
of inadequacy and apart-ness than heroism. The “victory” over Bernie
and the gangsters at the conclusion felt like a beautiful delusion and
fantasy more than cathartic triumph. Or maybe it was both at once, which
makes Drive more and more interesting to me, as if I’m losing my mind while watching it.
In Only God Forgives, the sense of the hero’s real-world
inadequacy is addressed. The passively observational and silent Julian
is in the shadow of his brother, a man with aggressive eyes with
specific demands to satiate his fetishes. Looking through a window into a
room of prostitutes (all lounging on a set that feels like something
out of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Billy says to the manager, with
chilling affectless speech, “Are those women? I want to fuck a girl. I
want to fuck a 14-year-old girl.” Violently making his way to another
bordello, Billy rapes and murders a teen prostitute who happens to be
the pimp’s daughter. The investigating police lieutenant, Chang, known
as “the Angel of Death” (Vithaya Pansringarm, who exudes a magnificent
presence), allows the father to do whatever he wants to the placid and
almost catatonic Billy–before having his own arm sliced off by Lt. Chang
as punishment for selling off his daughter. We see the after effects of
a terrible bludgeoning, Billy’s cranium opened up and spilling curdled
brain matter.
When Julian hesitates to avenge the murder because of the context
(“I’m sure he had his reasons,” he says of the pimp father), mother
Crystal shames and humiliates him. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
she says when Julian tries to explain things. A real man would have
brought her the head of Billy’s murderer on a plate. At a dinner, she
points out to Julian’s date Mai (Ratha Phongam), a prostitute who dances
at a club Julian frequents, how Julian (whose name is feminine) always
envied Billy for, among other things, the elder brother’s superior
penis. After the prostitute’s father has been killed by some of
Crystal’s hired thugs, Lt. Chang looks at Julian and judges he had
nothing to do with it (“He’s not the one”)–not because of evidence, but
because, so it seems, he intuits that Julian doesn’t have it in him to
carry out vengeance the way men like Billy and Chang do.
It’s a darker avenue of fantasy where what’s dream and what’s real
tumble together with uncertainty. The film’s shady and maze-like
interiors reminded me of David Lynch’s Red Room from his Twin Peaks universe, particularly as used during the prequel film Fire Walk With Me
and the television finale, where characters are lost between real and
unreal, waking and dream, good and evil, White Lodge and Black.
Characters speak in riddles, their dialogue recorded backward and played
forward. Fire Walk With Me was also booed at Cannes, but it
demands viewers adjust to its wavelength. Alongside its Laura Palmer
storyline of incest and murder was the mystery of the Red Room, the
other-world where garmonbozia (pain and suffering) is dished out through
bargains between supernatural characters. Lynch’s abstract methods are
in sync with what I think Refn is doing with Julian, who is wandering
through the landscape of the film as through the quandary of his mind. Only God Forgives has
other Lynchian motifs like singers on stages (with karaoke instead of
lip-syncing) and a terrifically rich sound design of saturated noise and
ocean-deep silences that drown everything, much like what we hear in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE (or Kubrick’s The Shining).
As with Lynch’s universe, I don’t think the bell-ringing of movie
references of Refn function as a base so much as another texture,
surrounding characters who drift tonally through a labyrinth of artifice
and longing.
The picture is problematic because of its sexuality. But I don’t
think Refn wants to do anything progressive so much as raw and ecstatic,
and that means delving into the insecurities of his male protagonists
(or himself as a filmmaker) and projecting them onto everything we see.
Like with Drive, Gosling’s strong-silent-type hero is chaste but the ubiquitous sexuality of Only God Forgives‘
lurid clubs and bordellos, in addition to the profane and
all-too-direct dialogue of Crystal and Billy (Crystal memorably calls
Mai a “cum-dumpster”), makes that chastity all the more alienating for
the protagonist. While watching Mai dance, Julian’s gaze becomes a
fantasy where he’s tied to a chair as she masturbates in front of him,
her imagined climax coinciding with an image of his dismemberment, as a
sword comes from the darkness and down on his outstretched arms. Speech,
sex, and violence swirl in a tainted soup for Julian (and Refn), and
stuck in the confines of his mind and gaze, he’s unable to do what he
sees around him, what others can do so easily. The cutting in the
scene, where her groin shifts to his, and the fantasy doubles for
cabaret performance, indicates how locked up Julian is within himself.
We watch this world that Julian seemingly is apart from and wonder if
he’s somehow the inventor of what we’re seeing.
That’s how Only God Forgives functions in the vein of a violent Asian-influenced revenge fantasy. Whereas Drive
gave audiences the satisfaction of its B-movie set-up with the hateful
evil-doers foiled and (in the case of that infamous elevator, literally) stamped out, Refn refuses such a release here, as the hero’s victory and transformation is his own immolation. Only God Forgives indulges
in the grotesque with its visceral ultraviolence, for example a
character’s rib cage bursting through a wound after he’s been sliced
open. But the violence is spread out between luxuriously moody sequences
of staring and wonder. It’s also off-screen most of the time. Refn
often denies us seeing the penetration of bludgeoning, stabbing, and
shooting. And as the story addresses Julian’s gendered inadequacies of
what being a “real man” is supposed to mean, Refn addresses how we
intake violence as viewers. Before a grueling session of violence
commences in a crowded club, Lt. Chang says, “Girls, keep your eyes
closed. Men, take a good look.” Chang then gets all Duke of Cornwall on a
poor chap’s eyeballs before going a little Mr. Blonde on the ears.
Maybe it’s that I’m not a real man, but my eyes were admittedly not
open for the whole proceeding. “You can’t see what is good for you,”
Chang says as his point goes into the vile jelly of the eyeball. I don’t
know if Refn wants us to look at everything (I have the same problem with the elevator boot-stomp in Drive, where I think the audience’s double is the horrified Carey Mulligan; and then there are those intestines from Valhalla Rising), but there definitely is a masculine code in Only God Forgives
which causes anxiety for Julian, and then it becomes our anxiety. I
have my problems with Refn’s violence as I do with Tarantino’s gleeful
“movie violence” (as opposed to Scorsese’s philosophy of violence, where
he wants you to be horrified and look away), but at least it’s not
blindly cathartic. It’s more like an endurance test.
Is Only God Forgives punishment? Not to be at all in
agreement with its detractors, but it’s a sincere question as to
whatever Refn’s motives are. The blonde haired and blue-eyed Hollywood
hero isn’t the one doing the tolling out in this picture; it’s this
Asian “Angel of Death,” whose katana sword, though pulled from behind
his back, supernaturally materializes from nowhere. Revenge violence is
fantasy that locks us in a spellbound gaze much like Julian’s sexual
fantasy with Mai, during which eyes looking directly at us before he’s
untied–and dismembered in this separate filmic/fantastical plane. Chang
may be a corrupt police lieutenant, but he’s a warm family man who
reads to his daughter at bedtime, and his crafty violence is inflicted
on pimps or thugs who’ve conspired against him and fellow officers.
Julian and his family are drug dealers and foreign invaders–much like
Refn’s film is invading Thailand–a Danish director and American star
leading a crew of mostly Thai employees. Crystal refers to the natives
as “yellow niggers” and doesn’t have time for their property or
perspectives. The confrontation of familial revenge is the song we’re expecting, but Refn changes the lyrics and point-of-view.
Refn’s pictures of lethal silent observers provoke us to wonder about perspective (people have told me that re-watching Drive
while thinking that the Driver is a delusional psychopath changed their
opinion of the film); the director could be “having a wank” (a phrase
people love to use when describing indulgent filmmakers, I guess) with
his web of allusions, his films a kind of midnight-movie karaoke. But
the karaoke displayed in Only God Forgives points to a sense of
how Refn’s appropriations are reverent, even strangely religious.
Instead of good-time off-key humor, the karaoke crowd — mostly of
policemen watching Chang at the mic — stares and listens attentively as
if during a ritual. The artifice is part of the design. Refn’s film in
tone, movement, and design feels very Kubrickian, and with the deep reds
against chilly blues I was particularly reminded of Eyes Wide Shut (whose principal lighting cameraman, Larry Smith, is Only God Forgives‘
cinematographer), another film set on the blurry boundaries of dream
and waking, artifice and myth, where the primal and haunting sounds of
the Somerton orgy are undercut when we see how Nick Nightingale’s organ
is hooked up to an amplifier. That film, with its scenario of a man set
on revenge fucking with strangers as retaliation against a spouse who’s
revealed her fantasies of infidelity, also, like Only God Forgives, denies the protagonist–and audience–the expectant orgasm.
From what I’ve read, the negative reviews about Only God Forgives are
neglectful of its title which denotes something religious. Here, Refn
continues to think about transformation: we see the metamorphosis with
criminal-artist Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy) in Bronson, the
silent one-eyed viking (Madds Mikkelsen) — who gives himself up for
sacrifice to American natives (and may be the god Odin) — in Valhalla Rising, and the quiet Driver who becomes a violent action-hero savior, dying and resurrecting with Drive‘s
final moments, the College song reminding us that he’s become a “real
human being and a real hero.” With its cavernous hallways and crimson
dream-like environs, Only God Forgives is like its own temple
or church, the plot secondary to a ritual’s solemn function. Gorgeously
rendered, its movements and atmosphere are wholly engrossing. The
implication is that Julian, like Bronson, One-Eye, and the Driver–in his
failure as a hero–becomes a “god,” if only in his own head, or the
hermetical universe of the film.
The boxing club where Julian works is replete with its own gods and
icons, the statues and pictures of the fighters from the past. Julian
and Billy groom adolescents for the ring, and we could see this as a
factory where aggression is manufactured. But the boy led to the ring by
Julian–which feels like a sacrificial altar–catches the riotous crowd
off-guard when he kneels and prays before his fight. As he does with
much of the film’s violence, Refn declines showing us a victorious blow
and instead cuts backstage afterward. His emphasis is on the ritualistic
element, and the young fighter’s meditative sensibility is linked to
his trainer, the watchful Julian, so different from the aggressive
automaton Billy.
Chang has a sense of sage conscientiousness distinct from other
characters. He leaves the stations of the cross in his wake, but what
of mercy (the “forgiveness” of the title)? Led to the hideout of a poor
man who was hired by Crystal to kill him, he slices open the ratting
informant but, presumably, lets the other man live. This other man
tells Chang that he’s ready to face the consequences but pleads “spare
my son,” a handicapped child whose eyes stare at us into the camera and
refuse to look away from the carnage. The man accepts responsibility
and his concerns are unselfish.
This marvelous and unforgettable sequence, with that child’s
inscrutable and unflinching face looking at us/Chang, reminded me again
of where I was coming from with this pulp revenge story. Julian’s
family is representative of a privileged class. Crystal verbally abuses
workers at the luxurious hotel in which she stays. Billy takes
advantage of poor working girls and their families, so poor they are
compelled to sell off their daughters. Chang, our presumed antagonist,
is fighting on behalf of the proletariat. He’s God’s messenger bringing
justice and retribution, ascending to the 42nd floor to confront the
nefarious and terrible Kali-Ma mother Crystal.
Julian is a movie hero who was born into the house of villains, and Only God Forgives rather
unsubtly delves into his struggle to return to–or be severed from–the
womb. It might sound, in our post-Freudian time of academic flippancy, a
little (or a lot) pretentious, but I think Only God Forgives
works because it hits some uncomfortable primal cords, in its
solipsistic and masculine cell, relating to Refn’s sense of cinema that
ring true. Refn himself says,
“The idea was to make a movie that takes place in the vagina and I
wondered what that would look like. Man’s fear of sexuality is the basis
of all horror from the male perspective.” I think there’s something
cheeky about his words, but it’s also sincere. The draped red confines
of the film’s clubs have a corporeal feeling, and Julian’s fascination
or desire for sex is not procreative but precocious. His fetish is to
see hands, his instruments of violence, in orifices (his first violent
assault in a club has him slapping–not punching–two male patrons and
dragging one of them through a hallway by the mouth). In a film that
confuses reality for dream, it’s possible that what we hear Crystal say
is in his self-loathing and sexually anxious imagination (such as that
colorful vaginal euphemism “cum dumpster”). Scott Thomas leaves an
incredible impression as Crystal, and seeing how she seems to be
existing on an alternate plane of existence from the rest of the film’s
characters, the performance is a work of art not out of line with what
Julian may have concocted in his imagination–though she governs his
movements, even if he knows they’re irrational.
She is the terrible mother who will eventually beg Julian to protect
her, who was told by doctors to “terminate” the pregnancy she had with
him, and who voices the hidden secret of what he’s done with his bare
hands to his father. Having given birth to him she now admits that
she’ll never understand him and never will. She’s a woman who might as
well be conversing with herself and naming all of the son’s sexual
insecurities. Julian really wants to get back inside of her (yeah…he does), as if to do everything over or will himself out of existence.
His confrontation with Chang at the boxing club is an anticlimax of atonement (and one of the reasons audiences who dug Drive
and Tarantino’s revenge movies will be disappointed with Refn here).
He’s not a worthy adversary for Chang, but his will to receive
punishment, as someone who doesn’t feel he deserves to live, is what’s
remarkable. The film’s structure, as sacrament more than plot-driven
narrative, is reminiscent of Raging Bull,
also about a self-destructive man who takes punches like he doesn’t
want to live. Redemption in that film wasn’t verbal or narrative, but
came with the audience seeing a man who was the worst kind of sinner.
“That’s entertainment!” becomes a kind of Holy Rite.
The instinct in revenge is the same for revenge-movie-going:
self-satisfaction. Refn’s film is a self-flagellating exercise where
we’re meant to contemplate otherness, be it races, reasons, or
perspectives. The opening credits refuse to translate themselves from
Thai to English for us. Words flow like money from Crystal’s mouth and
are used to control others, along with aggression. Julian’s most verbal
moment is when he walks on the streets with Mai after introducing her to
his mother. She says that she doesn’t want to keep the dress he bought
her and he wrathfully tells her to take it off immediately. But silence
is cinema for Refn, and the ritual of solitary gazing, like Chang and
the handicapped child looking at each other, or like Julian looking at
another child in the film, whom he has been instructed to kill, shifts
perspectives and makes people more receptive–a thought coinciding with
the symbolic castration/silencing (the reality of which is uncertain)
preceding the picture’s concluding karaoke moment of a spellbound
audience listening to the Angel of Death.
