I didn't think it was possible to be shocked by a film any more. Once I'd endured and survived the double climax of AI NO CORRIDA or the wedding night of CRIES AND WHISPERS, I thought I could endure anything. Nicolas Winding Refn has proved me wrong with a denouement so grisly, so gruesome, so nightmarishly plausible, I began to actually feel physically sick, disbelieving what I was watching.
David Thomson once complained that Claude Chabrol was always turning the messy, emotional realities of life into crime melodrama, as if this was somehow a cop-out, a refusal of reality. Surely today, where a pair of disenfranchised teenagers can shoot up a school, or a trio of petty criminals are so worked over by drug barons they can only be recognised by their dental records, this is no longer a valid objection. The vulnerability of the domestic and increasing psychosis of the alienated individual linked with gun culture suggests that maybe crime melodrama IS the only way to deal with reality.
Refn, though, does everything in his stylistic power to show how unreal reality has become, in his story of Leo, an unattractive, overweight, brooding, ordinary guy whose lack of enthusiasm for his wife's pregnancy is compounded by her telling everyone, bringing home mothers she's met at laundaries, and replacing his stuff with frog-shaped lamps. This sense of not being a person, a man, not even being asked for his opinion, is further fuelled by social humiliation and the reluctant witnessing of a race-related shooting and assault. His only social life comprising of schlock-movie nights in with his friends, he decides he needs a gun to feel a resurgence of masculine power.
Yes we're in the old FIGHT CLUB/THE BEACH oh-my,-poor-men-are-irrelevant sub-genre. Thankfully, though, Refn never loses his irony, troubling though it may be. The film throughout declares its artifice, its filtering of the medium through cinematic history. Instead of creating credible characters that grow in front of us, he introduces them over the credits with a name, sometimes a social relation (e.g. Leo's wife), and an appropriate musical leitmotif (pumping metallic techno for the lads; sensitive girly music for the ladies.
The film proper opens in a huge labyrinthine video store, and the first conversation is an enumeration of film directors, classic and cult, amusingly slotted into value shelves. Every shot in this film has a predecessor elsewhere, further undermining the film's realism (this is an inverse of another influence, Quentin Tarantino, who made film stereotypes into real people; Refn turns 'real' people into cinematically mediated shadows of themselves).
The credits pay homage to STRANGERS ON A TRAIN; the bloody fades to red could be Godard, Woo, Rollin etc. - dark premonitions of the climax; the idea of blood, family, nation and the very real themes of racism so urgent in Europe today (especially in my own country). The shy video clerk, a benevolent Travis Bickle or Wenders' Goalie.
The influence of Stanley Kubrick, however, is predominant, from the allusions to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the extreme wide-angle triangular shots revealing structures of power, the fascination with symmetry, both in composition and in the way alternating shots are edited. Although this style is very intrusive - and we are always aware of the camera - the film follows Kubrick's method of telling its story through its lead's consciouness, pulling us in until it's too late, as we reel away at the result. Refn shares Kubrick's pitiless irony, the sacred strains drowning the techno, the mock-resurrection into the light after the horrific slaughterhouse scene.
It would be wrong to say this film is enjoyable, but it paints a terrifying picture of contemporary Europe cut off from its own past (American culture saturates BLEEDER), yet repeating that past's mistakes. Male disenchanted nihilism is not the most original of themes, and female characters get short shrift.
Yet for all the absorption of 'foreign' culture, BLEEDER is not an indictment of American influence. The film offers hope in the form of two very shy, likeable workers, one obsessed with books, the other with films, both lost in labyrinths of both. Their disengagement from society means that they are not infected by its failure. Their coming together at the end, emerging from their solipsism is a hope, but it's a hope Refn can't quite share, as he abstracts their union, something precious but not quite real.
David Thomson once complained that Claude Chabrol was always turning the messy, emotional realities of life into crime melodrama, as if this was somehow a cop-out, a refusal of reality. Surely today, where a pair of disenfranchised teenagers can shoot up a school, or a trio of petty criminals are so worked over by drug barons they can only be recognised by their dental records, this is no longer a valid objection. The vulnerability of the domestic and increasing psychosis of the alienated individual linked with gun culture suggests that maybe crime melodrama IS the only way to deal with reality.
Refn, though, does everything in his stylistic power to show how unreal reality has become, in his story of Leo, an unattractive, overweight, brooding, ordinary guy whose lack of enthusiasm for his wife's pregnancy is compounded by her telling everyone, bringing home mothers she's met at laundaries, and replacing his stuff with frog-shaped lamps. This sense of not being a person, a man, not even being asked for his opinion, is further fuelled by social humiliation and the reluctant witnessing of a race-related shooting and assault. His only social life comprising of schlock-movie nights in with his friends, he decides he needs a gun to feel a resurgence of masculine power.
Yes we're in the old FIGHT CLUB/THE BEACH oh-my,-poor-men-are-irrelevant sub-genre. Thankfully, though, Refn never loses his irony, troubling though it may be. The film throughout declares its artifice, its filtering of the medium through cinematic history. Instead of creating credible characters that grow in front of us, he introduces them over the credits with a name, sometimes a social relation (e.g. Leo's wife), and an appropriate musical leitmotif (pumping metallic techno for the lads; sensitive girly music for the ladies.
The film proper opens in a huge labyrinthine video store, and the first conversation is an enumeration of film directors, classic and cult, amusingly slotted into value shelves. Every shot in this film has a predecessor elsewhere, further undermining the film's realism (this is an inverse of another influence, Quentin Tarantino, who made film stereotypes into real people; Refn turns 'real' people into cinematically mediated shadows of themselves).
The credits pay homage to STRANGERS ON A TRAIN; the bloody fades to red could be Godard, Woo, Rollin etc. - dark premonitions of the climax; the idea of blood, family, nation and the very real themes of racism so urgent in Europe today (especially in my own country). The shy video clerk, a benevolent Travis Bickle or Wenders' Goalie.
The influence of Stanley Kubrick, however, is predominant, from the allusions to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the extreme wide-angle triangular shots revealing structures of power, the fascination with symmetry, both in composition and in the way alternating shots are edited. Although this style is very intrusive - and we are always aware of the camera - the film follows Kubrick's method of telling its story through its lead's consciouness, pulling us in until it's too late, as we reel away at the result. Refn shares Kubrick's pitiless irony, the sacred strains drowning the techno, the mock-resurrection into the light after the horrific slaughterhouse scene.
It would be wrong to say this film is enjoyable, but it paints a terrifying picture of contemporary Europe cut off from its own past (American culture saturates BLEEDER), yet repeating that past's mistakes. Male disenchanted nihilism is not the most original of themes, and female characters get short shrift.
Yet for all the absorption of 'foreign' culture, BLEEDER is not an indictment of American influence. The film offers hope in the form of two very shy, likeable workers, one obsessed with books, the other with films, both lost in labyrinths of both. Their disengagement from society means that they are not infected by its failure. Their coming together at the end, emerging from their solipsism is a hope, but it's a hope Refn can't quite share, as he abstracts their union, something precious but not quite real.