Like most megacities, Los Angeles at night lives a very special life. At dusk, orange feathers swirl around the horizon, which gradually disappear as the sun gives way to city lights. Darkness and bright signs slowly envelop the streets, which are tired of the heat, and the haze of the day slowly leaves the local alleys and parking lots.
By midnight, the city is surrounded by colorful reflections on wet asphalt, as missing racers, empty-eyed models, worn out drug traffickers and corrupt police officers roam. They've all heard in one way or another about Charles Bronson, a misunderstood artist who wasn't lucky enough to be born a criminal.
Nicolas Winding Refn's work can be divided into three periods — Danish, English and American. The first one is associated with the dirtiest films about petty bandits. The second one features “on demand” series and adaptations of others' biographies. And during the third, the director shot commercials for big brands and slow movies about neon, dark alleys and drops of sweat born in the heat.
Thanks to his recent period, Nicolas Winding Refn has gained fame, fans and critics. Even at conservative film festivals, his work is accompanied by long applause, angry screams and whistles, which often merge into an inarticulate buzz. At the same time, over the years, the director has evolved visually, but not thematically.
In all three cases, he demonstrated the dark sides of human life and an irresistible desire to do bad things even in the most favorable situations. On the one hand, because the actions of its main characters are anticipated by the environment, not by their inner voices. On the other hand, it's because of sudden events that change things or turn history inside out.
In moments of crisis, Nicolas Winding Refn's characters separate from their own worlds, like David Lynch's phantasms. While someone is slowly being killed under the rays of neon, they take their time and savor every detail, despite disgust and fear. Just like Refn himself. According to legend, he literally cries while shooting particularly difficult scenes, but continues to work. Because it couldn't be otherwise.
The disgusting beauty of crime repeatedly pushes the director to commit a crime: he does not just record what is happening, but turns the source material into stylish sketches. But the glossy notebook under the cover of which they are kept is actually made of rotten pages soaked in moldy blood.
Nicolas Winding Refn makes films in contrast, simultaneously changing the classics neo-noir. Filth, the meditative beauty of individual moments, decay, silence and alienation merge into one. The main characters lose one after another in the course of the story, and some lose the fight before the events even begin.
Nicolas Winding Refn builds his stories without unnecessary dialogue, mainly using action and close-ups of empty faces. But from the background of each scene, the pace of editing and the colorful lighting, you can guess on an emotional level how the main characters feel. Or wonder if they're feeling anything at all.
No one can directly say what's going on inside them. Everyone in Niholas Winding Refn's world lies — himself, characters in his films, and even their commercials. The guise of “festival cinema” hides the life of difficult people and creatures pretending to be human. The latter seem to be using Jonathan Glazer's “Under the Skin” as a guide to organizing everyday life.
Nicolas Winding Refn's film language partly explains him dyslexia and color blindness, but this approach is too superficial. The hostages of his scenarios are not hastily written archetypes with a minimum of nuances, but life itself. Rather, its chaotic manifestations are chaotic accidents and fatal coincidences that give rise to drama “from scratch”.
The usual drama with a boiling point, a climax and a final crescendo doesn't work in Nicolas Winding Refn's worlds. The main characters may get hurt right at the beginning, in the middle, or before the opening scene. That's why “Drive”, “The Neon Demon”, and “Copenhagen Cowboy” do not resemble ordinary auteur or studio films, but rather peeping through a keyhole.
In an effort to preserve tiny fragments of fictional creatures, Nicolas Winding Refn resembles his idol Martin Scorsese. But Nicolas Winding Refn's method goes against the techniques of the New York Italian. Nicholas Winding Refn does not regulate the audience's inner compass and does not want to fit whole lives into his works, as Martin Scorsese did in the same “Killers of the Flower Moon”.
Not everyone is ready to watch how the apathetic main character loses once and gets his hands cut off, and relatively positive characters are strangled on a pig farm. Even with beautiful lighting and a symmetrical composition worthy of fashion magazines. But Nicolas Winding Refn, who resembles a street dog, deliberately bites the hand of anyone who dares to pay to see his movie. Because it couldn't be otherwise.
