Let’s Get Experimental: Her Private Hell and Motor City
Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn improbably delighted audiences with Drive, a glittering, electronica-tinged jewel of a thriller about a wheelman mired in gangland savagery. Since then, the Danish provocateur has made three features, two TV shows, a handful of shorts, and few new fans. I haven’t seen all of Refn’s post-Drive output, but what I have watched—the films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, plus the Netflix miniseries Copenhagen Cowboy—suggests the work of a postmodern imp concocting some sort of experiment in anti-entertainment. With perverse pleasure, Refn assembles the raw materials of putatively interesting pictures—vivid colors, gorgeous actors, shocking violence—and then scrambles them into final products that are dreary and charmless. He seems to fancy himself the cinematic prince of darkness, but his movies are less devilish than simply dull.
Her Private Hell, Refn’s latest piece of feature-length trolling, isn’t without its surface diversions. As befits the studio that distributed it, it supplies a good deal of neon—bright bursts of pink and blue slashing through its literal and metaphoric fog. The production design is, if not exactly legible, at least striking, with jagged plinths and infinite spires. The costumes are eye-catching, in particular a seductive red leather coat that seems intended to inspire fetishism. The movie might be appealing if it weren’t so insufferable. Read More
