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Rating: Only God Forgives is an extreme film.
Long stares lost in the void. Interminable silences. An unreal red that permeates a sleepy atmosphere, yet always tense like a violin string.
Extreme in its explosions of violence, which come after long waits, more powerful than ever.
The latest work by Nicolas Winding Refn is formally perfect and can speak without words, stun with the power of images, daze with sounds and music studied in every minute detail. The Danish director's work is total cinema, a most exquisite food capable of satisfying every perception. Only God Forgives is the apotheosis of everything the bespectacled filmmaker had shown us before: the intimate and close-up glances of Drive are now distant and lost in the void, yet never so close. The characters stare at each other in different places and times, but seem only inches apart. The composition of the set designs from Bronson, lavish like the last Kubrick, now takes on a symbolic value, every frame of this work is a precious painting. The primordial violence of Valhalla Rising here becomes pure destruction. Punishment. An animalistic rawness continuously underscored by the color red.
An X-rated film.
A film in white and red.
The actors do the bare minimum: Ryan Gosling is a marvelous statue (why don't you speak? Cit.), molded like clay for the functionality of every shot; Kristin Scott Thomas is a morbid and cynical mother, splendid in her ambiguity; but it is Vithaya Pansringarm who is the real master of the work, the very personification of punishment, a living law of retaliation, star of almost surreal musical interludes.
Characters always motionless, immortalized in all their being, so slow and measured as to make the few action scenes devastatingly effective.
A revenge film.
A wrong revenge, which even Julian (Gosling) does not approve of, despite being forced to kill to placate the sick thirst of a castrating mother.
The trick "endless stasis/action" also applies to the dialogues: few, dry, and often subtitled, which suddenly culminate in a Tarantino-esque dialogue entirely out of context, making it more incisive and incredibly amusing (I struggled to hold back laughter for at least 5 minutes).
And since I've mentioned Quentin, I'll add that there is a torture scene in this film that literally makes the historic one in Reservoir Dogs pale.
In conclusion, I would say that for me this is Refn's masterpiece. Maybe less original in form compared to his previous works, but absolutely perfect. To bring out a work like this after Drive was like climbing Mount Everest in underwear, smoking 5 cigarettes (unfiltered) simultaneously.
Nicolas managed it.
This is absolute cinema.
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By Mr.Black
"A way of making films never seen before."
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