Bangkok, basked in theatrical blood and phantasmagoric red colour, is a vision of hell in Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives, a violent thriller that premiered at the 66th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
Only God Forgives
One of the Competition titles, it stars Ryan Gosling as a man too scared to take revenge. The actor, who also starred in Winding Refn's 2011 Cannes hit Drive, was not in attendance at the premiere, but sent his apologies from Detroit where he is shooting his directorial debut How To Catch A Monster. Kristin Scott Thomas plays his monstrous mother, and Vithaya Pansringam as a mysterious cop who goes after everyone.
Right after the first screening, its detractors clearly outnumbered supporters _ the general mood is much less enthusiastic than when Drive was screened in Cannes two years ago, and Twitter was flooded with messages deriding the film. Curious Thai viewers won't have to wait long: the film is opening on June 27.
By looking at Bangkok as a surreal nightmare, Winding Refn, a Dane, takes an Orientalist fantasy to the hellish extreme. Women, mysticism, neon-splashed karaoke joints _ this is where wounded foreigners come to nurse their guilt, only to find that it is actually a penal colony and the punishment meted out, by gods or demons or thugs, is not as forgiving as in the Western religion.
Stylistically, Winding Refn may not be able to translate this into any real emotional involvement; by design, everyone is going through a somnambulant vacation (except Scott Thomas, who emits bitchy splendour), and the film can't quite elevate itself to the spiritual realm that it claims to be. It feels adrift and empty, and yet there's a sinister, subterranean, pulpy hum that gives the film its slow-burn octane.
Briefly here, since I'll write more when the movie opens in Thailand, Gosling plays Julian, a man who runs a muay Thai gym in Bangkok. He has a crazy brother, Bobby, who's killed in a dingy whorehouse (it's Thailand, so of course) after he himself has raped and killed a teenage girl. That sets off a chain of gruesome murders and revenge involving the two men's mother (Scott Thomas) and a stern-faced, statue-like, decisively violent ex-cop (Vithaya), who seems to be more powerful than the police, and perhaps an embodiment of a spiritual vigilante _ that good old kharma.
At the press conference, Winding Refn talked about how he believes his daughter could see ghosts in their apartment in Bangkok, and how the different interpretation of spirituality and mysticism in Asia helped him shape the tone of the story.
Only God Forgives also pays unusual tribute to several Thai cultural specificities: The film uses Thai lettering in the opening credits _ even the title "Only God Forgives" is spelled out in the Thai alphabet with no English accompaniment _ then the film goes on to include many Thai songs, luk thung, as well as sappy pop numbers, sung by the characters in dimly lit karaoke bars (the deadpan humour reminds us of Pen-ek Ratanaruang's films).
"One of the things I realised in Bangkok is that karaoke is a religion," Winding Refn says. "Because the film was shot at night, I saw that people go to these places and sing songs all night. It's almost like they live in that world, and it was very intoxicating... and yet so far removed from anything in my logic."
On Bangkok itself, the director said that he had been to the city as a tourist.
"To me, Bangkok is a mixture of New York and Los Angeles, I mean the craziness of it, but [then] I was just a stranger in a strange land. [When I came to shoot] I tried to put myself in a different position than I'd done in my previous films," he added. "I want to go somewhere else where I'm forced to do things in a different way. It wasn't until I started seeing Bangkok at night that I really began to visualise the film."
But in a visceral film drenched with macho energy, the person who seems to have a lot of fun is Scott Thomas, who plays the homicidally overbearing mum. Her dialogue is a form of verbal violence that has its equivalence in the men's sword-induced lacerations; Scott Thomas, shedding the aristocratic look and English accent, has the most priceless line in the entire Cannes Film Festival when she compares her two sons' penises at a dinner table. Motherly love is tres bizarre.
"At first it looked like [on the set] we were beating around the bush. So I said, 'Why don't we just say what we really mean, without thinking, just the worst possible thing, the nightmare thing? Why don't we just get those out?'. A lot of her language came up while we were shooting. If it had been written beforehand, I'd have been terrified [to say it].
"There's also something about the confidence that was building among us on the set that allowed us to go into this taboo thing."
Only God Forgives opens in Thailand on June 27.
Final act fails to fire
Cannes Film Festival ends on Sunday, when the jury led by Steven Spielberg announces the winner of the Palme d'Or. After the first half that saw quite a few solid offerings _ Jia Zhangke's A Touch Of Sin and the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis _ the Competition has felt rather feeble in the second half (we haven't seen two American hopefuls at this point, James Gray's The Immigrant and Alexander Payne's Nebraska). The hope of having a vintage year seems dashed, however.
Steven Soderbergh's Behind The Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas as a flamboyant homosexual pianist and Matt Damon as his toy boy, is amusing at best and repetitive at worst _ it's kind of fun to see Douglas in drag, acting like a Las Vegas queen buried inside her gilded tomb.
Another disappointment is Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a respected Chadian filmmaker who's back in the Competition with Grigris, a tale of a polio-afflicted dancer and his prostitute girlfriend. The film fails to lift itself out of the archetypal confines of an exotic/ethnographic village-life story.
Meanwhile, the Italian film La Grande Bellezza by Cannes favourite Paolo Sorrentino is a tedious homage to the faded grandeur of Rome and its aristocratic inhabitants.
What almost lifted up the mood is a three-hour-long French film, Blue Is The Warmest Colour, by Abdellatif Kechiche. Adapted from a graphic novel, the film is a lesbian love story, and the point of interest will be a very long, explicit and heart-pounding love scene between Lea Seydoux, with blue hair, and Adele Exarchopoulos, an ingenue in homosexual love. After the moving first two hours, the film weakens as the lovers are embroiled in domestic melodrama. Its actresses, however, are clearly frontrunners for the acting prizes.
Blue Is The Warmest Colour
