But no one can forgive this movie
I’m not the first to say this, because many have already seen and reviewed it. The wallpaper is more interesting than the plot in this numbingly violent, and simply numb and dumb, style-over-substance revenge drama flavoured by kickboxing, child prostitutes, and corrosive family relationships and set in nighttime, red-tinted Bangkok. Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, teamed up for Only God Forgives with Ryan Gosling, the star of his previous feature, Drive. This reunion does nobody any good. It makes you wonder if Refn has any talent as a director and it shows up the disconnect between Gosling’s physicality and his boyish sensitivity. This is a bad movie posing as an art movie. It’s torture to watch, and all you’ll come away with is the wallpaper and some nice green tones and angles of light in a couple of rare daytime scenes.
There is something childish about the whole setup, a boy’s idea of a cool, mean gangster movie. Refn’s use of big opening and closing titles in Siamese script likewise is like a kid’s showing off: look how exotic this movie is. But it isn’t. It’s just a crude fantasy that’s not thought through. The characters and plot only exist for the duration of their scenes, and hardly even then, with no sense of mystery, three-dimensionality, or life beyond. Billy (Tom Burke) rapes and murders a teenage prostitute and is killed by her father. A corrupt, blank-faced policeman (Vithaya Pansringarm) permits this man to kill Billy, and then brutally punishes him for doing so. Each of these acts is hideously violent, even though not everything is shown. Already Only God Forgives has become a movie that delights in violence for its own sake and heavy-handed exoticism. Already even in the depictions of these simple events the storytelling falters, motives and connections seeming unclear.
Billy and and his younger brother, Julian (Gosling), so we’re told, are involved in drug dealing and Julian, as we see, runs a teenage kickboxing club, the latter more wasted and sketchy local colour. Now arrives the usually suave, elegant and British (or impeccably French) Kristin Scott Thomas in extraordinary drag as a bleach-blonde bitchy American, mother of Billy and Julian, come to exact revenge for Billy. Booking aggressively into a hotel suite, this foul-mouthed hellion hires a man (Gordon Brown) to kill the aggrieved father who has killed her first-born son. This hired killer is then tortured and maimed by the corrupt cop, with his uniformed minions sitting around, in a sequence of prolonged brutality in a nightclub. By this time you may have walked out or shut off the set, changed the channel. If so, you did right.
Everyone likes to say that Scott Thomas introduces a note of spice in her campy, unaccustomed role, but it’s pretty hard to enjoy anything in Only God Forgives. Even the wallpaper (there are amazing eamples of big swirly patterns you couldn’t make up) and the nice greens are hard to enjoy amid the brutality and the crudeness. Except for Scott Thomas, who holds forth at some length, most of the characters, most notably Gosling’s, are instructed not to talk, or to say little, and they tend to stare into the camera and pause long before what little they do finally come out with. This sometimes makes Only God Forgives seem like a silent film. But Refn doesn’t achieve silent film’s sense of drama. The pauses destroy any rhythm the movie might have. The action sequences are badly handled, most notably in a hand-to-hand fight between Julian and the corrupt cop in the kickboxing club. The cop totally trounces Julian, leaving him battered, bloody, and limping. But the defeat isn’t convincing. Gosling is obviously feinting and air-punching. Of course he is supposed to be weak; his mother says so. But why then does he have such a cool swagger and such big muscles? Mom tells the cop Julian is a very dangerous man and not very good in a fight. It doesn’t compute. And Tarantino without the dialogue is nothing.
The cop wields a martial arts sword with which he kills and severs limbs and in his spare time, watched by the young uniformed lesser cops, he sings love songs in a karaoke bar. These latter scenes suggest Refn is stealing from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as well as from Tarantino. The lush, lurid colour and the Asian urban mess, the whole visual mood, might be stolen from Wong Kar-wai — and there’s a Wong-like scene where a hoodlum guns down most of the customers in a dive restaurant — except this only points up how much livelier Wong’s scenes are and how much more brilliant and dynamic Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is than these relatively static images, and of course how wildly romantic and fascinating Wong’s plots and dialogue are. None of that here.
Only God Forgives debuted at Cannes in May 2013, where Mike D’Angelo’s tweet-rating was a 17, his lowest before his walkouts. It’s released in the UK 2nd August 2013.
DIRECTOR: NICOLAS WINDING REFN
STARS: RYAN GOSLING, KRISTEN SCOTT-THOMAS, VITHAYA PANSRINGARNVITH, TOM BURKE, GORDON BROWN
RUNTIME: 90 MIN
COUNTRY: FRANCE, THAILAND, USA, SWEDEN
Film Rating: 4 out of 10 stars