Rarely do films split rooms with such unrelenting vigour as ONLY GOD FORGIVES. The hyperbole – both positive and negative – already connected to Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film is astounding. It is a reflection of an undeniably talented director, but a visceral, disturbing film. Despite an apathetic approach to storytelling, ONLY GOD FORGIVES is a remarkable piece of aesthetic cinema, one that certainly deserves recognition, even if not approval.
ONLY GOD FORGIVES concerns American ex-pat, Julian (Ryan Gosling), who runs a boxing club in Bangkok as a front for his family’s drug business. When his brother, Billy (Tom Burke) rapes and murders a sixteen-year-old prostitute, an operatic revenge melodrama is set in motion involving the father of the girl, Julian and Billy’s mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), and a near-supernatural police officer, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).
It feels hyper-conscious, from start to finish.
One of the more frustrating elements of ONLY GOD FORGIVES is that it’s almost too meticulous. Every frame looks incredible; there is no denying that the cinematography is immensely impressive. However, with such an emphasis on style, the film misses something in the way of substance. It feels hyper-conscious, from start to finish. Even the way Gosling broods, his limited emotion and painstakingly slow movement that was the essence of cool in DRIVE, feels contrived here.
Regardless of these criticisms, the film is remarkable – tense at all times and psychologically engrossing. The extent of the gratuitous violence is repulsive, but equally compelling. Although the mode of storytelling warrants criticism, the film as a whole is so teeming with metaphor and symbolism, overt story is a secondary concern. Each ethereal pseudo-dream sequence requires a serious amount of translation, enough to occupy the mind a number of days from the film’s end. It is in this complex mirage that the film finds its strength. Whilst it may not sate those seeking a conventional narrative film, the blend of colour, light, music and atmosphere creates one very intoxicating and hallucinatory aesthetic.
…tantamount to being stuck in a ponderous nightmare, but one you’ve agreed to partake in.
Under the dense layers of symbolism casual viewers will inevitably struggle to discern what, if anything, the film is actually about. Many will be bewildered as to the film’s general direction. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a fairly simple, style-over-substance revenge narrative, but it feels like that somewhat misses the point. Whether or not Gosling delivers in his role, the film certainly centres on his character. Stuck in a paralysed, hopeless purgatory, he has been utterly emasculated by a dominant, matriarchal mother. Crystal, the aforementioned matriarch, is a strong Oedipal figure. She has fulfilled that role to the point of manipulating her son, it is heavily implied, into killing her domineering husband. Their relationship, and their interactions with Chang, are essential to the symbolism, and represent the film at its strongest.
It’s difficult to know what to make of ONLY GOD FORGIVES. It’s undeniably impressive, but simultaneously disappointing. It’s unmissable, in the sense that it’s such a divisive film that your own opinion needs to be formed. It’s tantamount to being stuck in a ponderous nightmare, but one you’ve agreed to partake in.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXQskTJS6Eg
I agree that the film is not only disappointing, but also (which is why I stayed to watch) impressive : not sure that it is ever a question of style or substance, but rather that the mode of depiction, which I found was over-reliant on creating mood by musical means, leaves a possibly intentional gap between perception and reaction, which is only productive when there is some stake in the characters, what they seek and what their fate may be, whereas did one much care ?
Maybe a little like a Greek tragedy, but one that ignores what Aristotle says about tragic characters and substitutes anti-heroes – in doing so, it critiques what we value in a narrative such as Drive (2011), and why we both want Gosling to succeed in that film, and events there turn out as they do.