This week, just a month or so after it premiered in Cannes to a now-traditional Refn reception of mingled admiration and jeers (we were among the admirers), “The Neon Demon” comes to theaters. But though we enjoyed splashing about in its overly stylized, glossily shot shallows, where does “The Neon Demon” sit amid the Danish filmmaker’s catalogue? We figured now would be a good time to revisit his filmography, considering the last time we did so was before the release of his later-career-defining, Cannes Best Director-winning “Drive.”
READ MORE: The Best And Worst Of The 2016 Cannes Film Festival
Refn (who is colorblind, trivia fans, and can’t see mid-colors, hence the high level of contrast in all his works) was pretty much born into the business, his mother a successful photographer, his father himself a director and editor in the Danish film industry (he cut Lars von Trier‘s “Breaking the Waves” and “Antichrist,” which makes Refn’s recent trashtalking about his fellow Dane all the more, um, cutting). The fledgling director’s first film, “Pusher,” saw him become identified with a wave of gritty, social realist, urban European dramas in the mid-1990s that proved deeply influential. However his career almost immediately stalled when sophomore effort “Bleeder” in 1999 and its follow-up four years later, “Fear X” which was his first film shot in English, both flopped, leading him to scrap his next planned project, “Billy’s People.”
Instead, he headed back to the world of “Pusher,” in the form of two sequels he wrote and shot back-to-back in the span of two years. This worked out well, as portrayed in the excellent 2006 documentary “Gambler” (available as a special feature on the ‘Pusher Trilogy’ DVD set), and is a rare example of a filmmaker making sequels, unashamedly for the money, yet finding the films paying off creatively as well as financially. With his debts settled and a new-found artistic philosophy in place, Refn moved on to the next stage in his career, with “Bronson,” “Valhalla Rising” and then “Drive,” which won him Best Director at Cannes. Since that win, he’s attained a degree of celebrity that has itself spawned a documentary, impishly titled “My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn” (because it is not directed by Refn but by his wife, Liv Corfixen), as well as a starring central role in Frank Pavich‘s much more successful doc “Jodorowosky’s Dune.” And of course, he’s been back to Cannes twice, first with his reteam with latter-day muse Ryan Gosling on “Only God Forgives,” and now with “The Neon Demon,” which sees him for the first time (unless you count his TV version of ‘Miss Marple‘ which we do not) featuring a female lead in Elle Fanning. Read on to discover just where we rate it in the canon of one of the most divisive, infuriating, interesting and emblematic international filmmakers to have emerged in this new century.
11. “Miss Marple: Nemesis” (2007)
It never seemed like anything less than a baffling career sidestep, and as time goes on it only becomes more hilariously weird a choice: the arch-stylist prince of pulp and violence taking on episode of an ITV adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s fustiest creation. We hope the pay was good, as it displays nothing of Refn’s directorial personality — no stylistic flourishes and no visual creativity whatsoever. The title character (played by Geraldine McEwan of “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves“) receives a letter from a wealthy man she met once, stating that she is to solve a crime, the details of which he remains coy about, in order to receive the money he left her in his will. Slowly she uncovers a story about a disappeared nun, and the plot thickens, bodies start dropping, and the intrepid Marple must figure out who is responsible. It’s serviceable as a TV movie mystery, but it lacks that certain aggressive intrigue that the best of the genre has, and it is certainly slow to get going. And with Refn playing it straight, save for a few moments (an expository dining scene, in which everyone interjects and relays information, is made playful/amusing by placing everyone at small two-seater tables), all this outlier really does is prove that he can be faceless. As a result, this is one neither for Refn completists, who won’t find anything to their taste here, nor for Christie fans, who probably couldn’t care less about the filmmaker’s pedigree.
10. “Fear X” (2003)
A fairly standard-issue thriller given a twist of unquantifiable psychic weirdness, “Fear X” is based on an original screenplay by “Requiem for a Dream” author Hubert Selby Jr. It stars John Turturro as a security guard whose wife was recently murdered at the mall where he works, and who has been obsessively trying to piece together the details surrounding her death, with a wall of his house devoted to possible suspects culled from surveillance footage. When he finally gets a break in his investigation (aided, in no small part, by a mystical vision of his wife’s ghost), things turn truly bizarre, leading to an ending that no one (including Turturro and Refn) can adequately explain, but it’s just the culmination for the film’s unfortunate tendency to get less engaging as it goes on — in the second half when the perspective is split between Turturro and James Remar, as the sympathetic murderer (who appears to be involved in some kind of shadowy, corporately funded group that systematically murders dirty cops), the oppressively claustrophobic atmosphere of the first part of the film dissipates into a low-lying mist. It retains a degree of spookiness, a lot down to an ace Turturro performance, and some of Refn’s more daring touches (he often pushes the camera into the back of Turturro’s head to reveal a small demonic figure pushing against his brain) and it does feature a dread-inducing minimalist electronic score by Brian Eno. But it’s ultimately frustrating despite its positive elements, and in retorspect it is not hard to see why “Fear X” was such a commercial failure that it forced Refn to shutter his production company.
9.“Bleeder” (1999)
In many ways, “Bleeder” feels more like a first film than “Pusher.” Where Refn’s debut displayed a confidence in its style and narrative with a firm grasp of tone, “Bleeder” is rather arrogant and show-offy in those departments (take, for example, a shot early in the film where the camera flies all over a video store as it glides by shelves upon shelves of VHS tapes). It feels a bit all over the place, and at times unwieldy, like the filmmaker had a lot of ideas he was wrestling with and didn’t know how to completely tie them together. But upon subsequent viewings, and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, those issues become more charming, the product of an overzealous director willing to go places most won’t dare, resulting in some radical, WTF tonal and genre shifts. This is basically Refn’s take on the slacker comedy, or to be more precise, this is his “Clerks” mixed with “High Fidelity” with a dash of “Eraserhead” and a crazy violent streak that seems directly pulled from the ‘Pusher Trilogy‘. In fact, the violence is the film’s biggest issue. The scenes involving guns come off as forced and awkward, but the flaws are outweighed by a pure passion for cinema and a self-awareness that what you’re watching is in fact a falsity. Refn reunited his three male actors from “Pusher” for the film’s dual narratives: one is charming and cute, about a movie-obsessed social misfit (played with aplomb by Mads Mikkelsen) working at a video store and trying to connect with a pretty blond he meets; the other is raw and brutal, about a man (Kim Bodnia) trying to deal with the fact that he’s about to become a father, and the manifestation of his fear of growing up. The former storyline is the most appealing, and makes up for some of the latter’s more outlandish and extreme moments. Ultimately, “Bleeder” is a tough film to grasp, but it’s much more successful approached as a piece of self-reflexivity, one that exists in a dreamy/nightmarish (un)reality that Refn would explore further and more successfully later.