Review of Sexy Beast (2000)

Jonathan Glazer's "Sexy Beast" opens disarmingly as Ray Winstone's retired gangster Gary "Gal" Dove suns himself by his swimming pool in Spain, lamenting on the good life he has, before a boulder tumbles down a cliff, sails over his head and lands in the pool. Gary seems to look upon the fact that he's not dead as a further example of his extraordinary luck. These early scenes are important because they do two crucial things; they accurately set up Gary's character as someone living a life of luxury, and they also reinforce the off-kilter, weird tone that Glazer sticks with throughout. Cliché though it may be to say it, there can't be many gangsters film like this. It's one of a kind.

After this opening, we come to know a little bit more about Gal. He's living the high-life with his wife, DeeDee (Amanda Redman), herself a retired porn-star, and his friend Aitch (Cavan Kendall), and Aitch's wife Jackie (Julianne White). They are all happily married, and we discover what became one of my favourite aspects of the film; that the women in the film aren't the usual one-dimensional, mute, gangsters molls. They have their own personalities, and in a few key moments actually prove themselves to be stronger than the "hard" men they are married to. It was certainly refreshing to see DeeDee holding a shotgun (although why she holding it, and who she was aiming it at, if anyone, I will not say).

Once this idyll has been established, we find that Gal's opulent lifestyle is soon to come under threat by the imminent arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley). This news scares Gal, and when Don Logan arrives we understand why. A fearsome, ferocious and foul-mouthed monster who comes very close to evil incarnate. I was reminded of Michael Gambon's turn as Albert Spica in Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover", and they seem to occupy space the same way; by insulting it, swearing at it, and spewing out sexist diatribes. A lot has been written about how Kingsley is the last person you can see nailing this kind of role, yet the proof is there on screen; his presence is genuinely unsettling. He's also, crucially, not a man you can say "no" to, although that doesn't stop Gal when Don keeps asking him to come out of retirement for one last job.

Ah, you're thinking, this is one of those films where there is a "one last job", which will invariably go wrong, resulting perhaps in a shoot-out and a late in the day revelation or two. You're wrong. Admittedly it does, indeed, feature a retired gangster pulling one last job. But the film maybe spends 15 minutes on the minutiae of it, and doesn't seem to care about it too much, aside from what it can tell us about the characters. Or, namely Winstone's character. The only downside to Kingsley's performance is that it's the kind of turn that steals a film, when for me by far the most affecting character and performance is Gal himself. I was surprised at how invested I became in his fate by the end of the film. Again, I think this is because the film dodges clichés so mercilessly. Gal has a heart, and he's a genuinely loving person, displayed in his relationship with pool-boy Enrique (Álvaro Monje) and also his wife. He's a million miles removed from the dominating patriarch we expect from this kind of material. I grew very fond of him.

Glazer's direction also vastly helps the film. Coming from a background in commercials and music videos at the time, this is a heavily stylized film, and oddly beautiful. Using a 2.35:1 aspect ratio to spacious effect, the film disarms us with an inventive use of symmetry, space, and character placing. It's also a very, very sunny film, and even the scenes shot at night seem more brightly lit than the average gangster film (bar a few exceptions when Gal goes to do his job, and deals with Logan). It's a film that seems weirdly aware of itself, and the quixotic direction exacerbates the sense that things are not right, not what we've come to expect from this kind of thing. The dialogue, too, plays a part in this, with the kind of amusing and offbeat utterings such as "You're lovable. Big lovable bloke. Lovable lump. Lovable lummox." I was reminded, weirdly enough, of Dylan Thomas's writing. That's high praise indeed. 

Ultimately, though, as I often am with films, I was left with a remarkable attachment to the characters. How Glazer takes the usual composites of a run-of-the-mill gangster film and turns them into something weird, original, funny and with a palpable love for the Gal, DeeDee and the like is like watching a magician run a variation on a card-trick that you think you've seen before, only to realise that you haven't, and then be blown away. 

Review of Valhalla Rising (2009)

Nic Winding Refn is one of the most interesting directors currently working, and if that sounds like code for “he’s good but not great”, or “his ideas are worthwhile but his films aren’t”, then it isn’t. He’s one of that rare breed of current film-makers, along with Rob Zombie, Lars von Trier, Aki Kaurismaki and others, where you can sense the joy he has in making his film, whilst the film itself remains serious. I appreciate this approach. It often results in films which are fun, unique, thoughtful, and yet maintain their surface effect of being tense, thrilling, scary.

This principle is in effect in abundance throughout Refn’s “Valhalla Rising”, a film which is indebted to David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sigmund Freud, and yet works perfectly well on its own terms. It takes two endlessly fascinating recurring tropes in art (that of the silent, omnipotent “superman”, and the descent into hell/the heart of darkness), and weaves a giddy, scary, fierce concoction of images around that. Set against the backdrop of the crusades, it’s a fascinating, weird and scary film that slots nicely into Refn’s oeuvre.

We begin with the mute Norse soldier One-Eye (aptly named), who is kept in a cage and fed gruel in a dirty bowl. He is occasionally wheeled out by his owners, and made to fight other men. He’s very good at fighting, as a lot of characters in Refn’s films are. In his very first scene, he is tied to a post, and yet manages to disarm and break the necks of two men attacking him with knives. There is hushed talk of how One-Eye has yet to lose a fight, and maybe, just maybe, he is sent from Hell itself. He is feared, and certainly fearsome. Played by Mads Mikkelsen, he is not so much a character as an interactive piece of scenery Refn decided to use. He is more of an embodiment, of the male psyche, of our desire to be strong, of Christ, of Death, and so on.

One day, One Eye is sold to a new troupe, and in a brutal scene involving evisceration and clubbings, he escapes. He murders every single one of his new owners, bar a child known only as “The Boy” (Maarten Stevenson), who One Eye comes to communicate through. (here we see one of the oldest tropes in cinema come through; you can brutally slaughter any grown man in any number of ways, but a child? No way).

One-Eye and The Boy trek, and trek, and trek some more, until they meet a group of Christian Crusaders trying to find the holy land. After this, the film gets murky in a very Danish way, and the chapter titles that the film portions itself up with get more overtly theological; “Part 3: Men of God”, “Part 4: The Holy Land”, and my favourite, the portentous “Part 5: Hell”.

Refn has composed this film to within an inch of itself, as is his method. There’s a certain rejection of a traditional narrative, and in place of it there is symbolism, imagery; overtones as opposed to a stance. Refn very effectively creates a sense of heightened reality, where all things are imposing and foreboding, accentuated by his use of the booming, pulsing, electronic score, composed by Peter Peter and Peter Kyed. Their work is, arguably, the most important component of the film, or certainly the most prominent, and without it the film may have been laughable, or worse, dismissible. It forces you to deal with it.

Luckily, there is a lot to deal with. Just because Refn has tropes that he appears to return to film after film (mainly, men), doesn’t mean that those tropes aren’t worthwhile. He’s picked a good subject to make films around. The film this time has a loose, strung together style that evokes Apocalypse Now and, in more than one instance, Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God”. Those are two seminal films about very similar themes, and it’s good company for the film to be in. The cinematography by Morten Søborg adds a certain sense of unease, shifting from meticulously composed symmetrical compositions to floating, faux-documentary style, from cutting far wide, to entering extreme close-up. And the lighting, too, is a delight, and the obvious use of red-lighting (a weakness of mine) is extraordinarily effective.

By turns horrifying and beautiful, slow and weird, it’s a film where violence is never far away and men hitting each other is the order of the day; just like everything else Refn has done (and in particular it makes a great companion with Refn’s later “Only God Forgives”, which shares this films tendency for the juxtaposition of aesthetic and brutality). There's more than one wince-worthy moment.

The film also has heavy-handed religious themes and ideas, having immense fun with the crusades backdrop (choice dialogue: “we’ve raised the cross, now we will raise the sword!”). It makes us think about the nature of God complexes. There's a recurring image of a man trying to stack stones, but they keep falling down, and the film hints at more than one instance that it's about the sort of nature we try to impose on everything to console ourselves of the cruel, chaotic, deterministic nature of the universe. But then, the film's about a lot of things.

It comes across as a sort of The Seventh Seal on acid, although no flashy grab-line can really do justice to the film. It makes me picture Refn sat by his camera in the Scottish Highlands, giggling to himself as he wonders what would be great to shoot next. Ultimately, it’s the kind of film only Refn could make, and that comes with the caveat that it’s the kind of film only Refn would make. But you know what? Good for him.

Review of Hana-Bi (1997)

Shockingly gruesome violence and moments of genuine love and tenderness make oddly comfortable bedfellows in this brutal yet touching film from Japan’s Takeshi Kitano (or “Beat Takeshi”). The film follows an ex-cop called Nishi, played by Kitano himself, who is no longer on the force due to an incident resulting in the deaths of his co-workers. The film takes a while to arrive at these plot points, however, and marks itself out principally as a terse examination of this character. Take the first scene, where he makes two louts clean his car. When one of them falters, he kicks him to the ground. As with a lot of the characters Kitano plays in his other films, violence is something that comes naturally, too naturally. He’s a more unpredictable variant of the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” type.

Yet somewhere, buried deep, he has a heart. We learn that his wife is seriously ill, dying, and through his interactions with her we see that he is a man capable of warmth, love, good humour. One very crucial scene has him robbing a bank to pay for them to take a trip away together, and where another, perhaps lesser film, would have dwelled on the excitement of the heist, Kitano plays the scene off cooly, showing only the elements we need to know. He walks in dressed as a police office. He points the gun at the bank clerk. She understands what to do, hands him the money, and then Nishi leaves.

This stripped back style, which amounts to a tranquillity, pervades the film from beginning to end. The film occasionally comes across as using montage. Take the notorious scene early on where Nishi stabs a man in the eye with a pair of chopsticks. It is a brutal scene, yet it is played in such a manner where we see no actual violence. Nishi picks up the chopsticks, and gestures. We hear a scream. Blood falls onto the table in front. The man, chopsticks in his eyes, falls to the floor. But we never see the chopsticks go into the eyes, and the scene is effective primarily with the power of suggestion. It proves Eisenstein’s theory of montage, that the human mind will make connections between random images.

That’s not to say that there isn’t other, more graphic violence in the film. This is one of those films where when people are shot, they die, and we watch them die. It calls upon the viewer to reflect on the senseless nature of killing. It approaches violence in a manner I found agreeable, not exploitative but instead contemplative, befitting perhaps a Michael Haneke film. It also has a good line in guilt, as we scrutinise Kitano’s expressionless face and find, deep down, a sadness.

Yet for a film concerning itself with much killing, death and anger, what struck me as most moving were the moments of tenderness Kitano peppers his film with. The relationship between Nishi and his wife Miyuki, played by Kayoko Kishimoto, struck me and actually takes up a majority of the second half of the film. I came to admire how Kitano observes Nishi’s capabilities for tenderness. There’s a scene where the pair are playing a guessing game with playing cards. Miyuki is holding the cards up, and time after time Nishi is guessing them correctly. Nishi can see them reflected in the mirror behind Miyuki. It’s a beautifully played scene with a sublime little payoff, and it adds brilliantly to the curious tone Kitano is going for. There is also a scene where Miyuki is putting dead flowers in a jar of water, and a man observes that she must be mad to do so. Nishi beats him half to death as a result. The scene, whilst brutal, I nevertheless found moving because of Nishi’s fierce commitment to his wife.

There’s also a subplot involving Nishi’s ex-partner Horibe, played by Ren Ohsugi. Paralysed from the waist down and abandoned by his wife and children, he is despondent and hopeless, suicidal. Nishi gets him some art materials, and a fair portion of the film is devoted to observed his efforts at artwork. It might seem superfluous, but I liked how it brought into focus the twin peaks of his film, brutality and beauty.

It may not please all people. I came to appreciate the juxtaposition of violence and loveliness, because the two seemed to accentuate each other, but some may find them ill-fitting. The film has a non-linear construction which some viewers may find odd or off-putting, and admittedly the film does take a while to settle into what it’s actually doing. But I found it, above all, to be a poetic and sublime film with a purity to the camerawork and a refreshingly pared back approach to the emotions, which run deep. It’s the antithesis of gangster movies which measure their emotions purely in body-counts and it makes me very eager to see more of Kitano’s work. As a study of guilt, hurt, male rage and love, you won’t see many better examples than this one.