Only God Forgives - but is it art?

I've waited all weekend before trying to put my thoughts about Only God Forgives down into the Blogosphere.  I saw the film on Friday evening last week.  I had been hoping to see one of the final showings of Pacific Rim, but due to poor takings that seems to have vanished off screens early.  Instead this new and very moody-looking film was offered up as a replacement.  The trailers for Only God Forgives make it look stylised and hint at a violently brutal storyline.

It turns out that the trailers did a very good job, because to call Only God Forgives stylised is to hugely understate what this film is.  It is one of the most heavily-stylised pieces of film-as-art I've seen in a long time.  If you thought Stoker was stylised, you aint seen nothing yet.  Not a single shot of Only God Forgives goes by without the director lovingly ensuring that the light from nearby street lamp falls in exactly the right place over a character's face, everything has been sculpted to an impossible level of perfection.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, son to criminal Matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) and brother to a man murdered in vengeance for raping and killing a local girl prostitute.  Julian is a big time drug dealer in Bangkok, and when Crystal arrives in town to demand that Julian find and kill her son's murderer, Julian tells her that he has already found the man, but decided to let him go.  After all, he did rape and kill the man's daughter.  Crystal flies into a rage at this, and hires her own killers to do the job she thinks Julian wasn't man enough for.  All well and good, except for the local police chief Chang, the man who was responsible for telling the girl's father about her murder and effectively goading him into killing Julian's brother in revenge.  Crystal decides that he too is responsible for her son's death, and so resolves to kill him too.

It is around this conflict that the film then revolves.  For Chang is not the sort of person anyone should be messing with.  Chang is portrayed as a deliberately slow-mannered man.  He is a man who sings karaoke to a room full of police officers silently appreciating him, a man who walks as if carried on a cloud and hands out justice in the manner he sees fit with the pointy end of a sword.  He is a character that the film portrays as an almost other-worldly force, an entity that exists out of the realm of normality silently passing judgement on the filth of society in a variety of excruciatingly violent ways that more than justify an 18 rating.

The title of the film implies a connection to the Judeo-Christian concept of god.  The implication being that either Julian or Chang represent god, or that they perhaps each represent two halves of the god presented in the bible.  Julian perhaps is the god of the new testament, turning the other cheek to the killer of his brother; Chang perhaps is the god of the old testament, breathing fire and brimstone and bringing righteous vengeance upon anyone stupid enough to challenge him.  Perhaps instead Chang is the devil and Julian is god, Chang the bringer of vengeance and death, Julian using his inner strength to bring peace?

All of this is fine of course, except that the film itself is mostly over-stylised gibberish and miles too slow even for its short 90 minute run time.  It's art masquerading as cinema.  Director Nicholas Winding Refn clearly had a vision for what he wanted to do on screen and it's all up there without much in the way of script editing by anyone else.  There are too many scenes of Ryan Gosling staring at his knuckles or having visions of Chang or sitting in rooms with prostitutes milling / sitting around artistically (can anyone tell me why this is in the movie?).  No one needs more than one scene of Chang standing in front of his police underlings singing karaoke - here was have 3.

When I left the cinema on Friday I was astonished that someone would be willing to put such a film together, let alone show it in cinemas and claim it was a movie.  I was amazed that a movie exec somewhere hadn't vetoed what was going on before it became a mainstream release.  With the calm reflection of 5 days behind me though, I'm happy to give Only God Forgives a little more leeway and declare it at the least interesting.  If you thought Drive was too slow then you will hate this.  But if you're happy to sit through 90 minutes of slow-burning violence you might find something of interest here.  Have a go if you've got the time, but don't blame me if you hate it.