Setting the stage by echoing Irreversible’s chronological mischief, structurally it’s as intrepid as anything in Noé’s filmography. A series of talking head recordings follow, establishing a colourful mix of twenty-something characters, and providing a handy checklist of reference points for what we’re about to watch via copies of Possession, Suspiria (opens in new tab), Labyrinth Man (the French title of Eraserhead), and more stacked up on either side of the static CRT TV.

Then, in the kind of sterile hall you can imagine a weekly game of bingo taking place (the film’s single location setting), an incredibly dynamic and thrillingly choreographed one shot dance sequence explodes off the screen for the best part of 20 unbroken minutes. Performed by the 30-odd real life dancers who fill the ranks of the cast, it’s bravura stuff, the camera fixed on impossibly limber bodies as they krump, flex, and gyrate to a pulsating, and near omnipresent, dance soundtrack populated by the likes of Daft Punk and Aphex Twin.

As if to further confirm the film’s singularly idiosyncratic structure, the garish opening titles flash on screen a full 45 minutes into the film along with the declaration “a French movie and proud of it”. It’s only then that Climax finally takes a breather, following the closest the film has to a central character, Sofia Boutella’s Selva, as she does the rounds on the dance floor, cosying up to her boyfriend, checking in on the mother of the group and her young son (let’s call him Chekov’s child) and liberally dipping a glass into the Sangria. With rehearsals over for the day, the troupe have nothing left to do but dance and drink. But nothing is ever that wholesome in the Noé-verse. As their behaviour gets more erratic, more depraved, it quickly dawns that someone has slipped a healthy dose of LSD into the booze, and the insanity has only just begun.

Part Step up, part Passolini’s Salo, the nightmarish depravity which unfolds could have been torn from the pages of Dante’s Inferno. While some characters seem to revel in the liberation that the ultimate bad trip provides, others suffer, tormented not for their sins, but seemingly at random. Character dynamics carefully established in the first half are twisted and weaponised in the second. The overprotective brother of one of the dancers, for example, is revealed to have a less virtuous love for his sister than it first appears, adding incest to the already ungodly mix.  

There are sudden moments of wincing, lump-in-throat violence here that rival the most shocking moments of Irreversible. But for a man who premiered porn at the world’s most prestigious festival three years ago, Noé exhibits a modicum of restraint, never letting the film get quite as graphic as you might expect/fear. At the centre of it all is Boutella, who gets one of the film’s standout sequences, homaging Isabelle Adjani’s demonic writing in Possession to breathtaking effect, hilariously getting her hands stuck down her tights at one point.

It’s electrified filmmaking, and full credit goes to Noé’s crew for the magic they work staging, lighting and capturing a thoroughly convincing underworld, bathing the dance hall in demonic red light as the camera performs the kind of gymnastics an Olympic athlete would win a gold medal for during an orgiastic finale.

Noé, naturally, cannot resist the impulse to go too far on occasion, at one point lowering the tone with some uncomfortably crass conversations. And with zero plot beyond ‘dancers on drugs lose their minds’, don’t expect to find any great meaning to the depravity. But Climax isn’t just Noé’s best in years, it’s one of the surprise highlights of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. How’s that for shocking.

Want more Cannes Film Festival coverage? Why not read our review of Mads Mikkelsen’s snowbound survival movie Arctic (opens in new tab).

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Set in some unspecified icy wasteland, when we meet Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) he’s already crash landed his plane in the arctic. Weeks, if not months, have passed and his routine has become muscle memory – waking up to the beep-beep of his watch, checking the fishing lines he’s set up to catch arctic trout, making a brief pilgrimage to a pile of rocks which we assume is a grave, fastidiously keeping the giant ‘SOS’ he’s cleared in the snow spotless, and spending hours winding a crank-powered device in the hopes of signalling help.

Shorn of incident or excitement, this opening sequence remains captivating. And how refreshing to see a survivor apply common sense to their actions (often in short supply in survival movies). One day, improbably, a helicopter appears but – just his luck – the chopper gets caught in a blizzard and the attempted rescue ends in catastrophe. His reaction is telling; not shock, disbelief, or even the urgent need to help, but weary acceptance. This man has seen some shit.

Despite his initial hesitance Overgård does eventually get to the chopper where one of the pilots is alive, but badly injured. Taking the woman back to his own stranded plane, Overgård treats her in the hope that their disappearance will be noticed and rescue is en route. But after a few days, with the woman’s condition worsening by the minute, Overgård opts to make a treacherous journey on foot to a point where, he believes, salvation lies.

What follows is a gruelling feat of endurance, both stark and visceral, as Overgård drags the woman across inhospitable terrain, dealing with sudden snowstorms, unscalable cliff faces and even polar bear attacks. Told almost entirely without words (Mikkelsen has about a dozen lines of dialogue, a good half of which involve shouting at the bear), Arctic gives us a deep understanding of a man we know next to nothing about purely from his actions. Never once does the action stop to give Overgård a heart-rending monologue, or cut to his anxious family at home, and the film is better for it.

Comatose throughout, the woman depends on Overgård for survival, but the opposite is also true. All but resigned to his fate when we meet him, Overgård’s connection to the woman is what drives him forward. A recurring motif is a picture that he finds of the pilot’s family, which he dutifully places beside her every night, in the hope it will be the first thing she sees if/when she wakes up. But what starts as a potentially mawkish device turns into a potted metaphor for his dogged dedication to staying alive.

Shot on location in Iceland in a mere 19 days, the film must have been a Revenant (opens in new tab)-like feat of endurance to put on screen. Every hulking footstep feels leaden, Mads’ luxuriant beard is permanently encrusted in frost. When Overgård removes his gloves you can practically feel the chill in the tips of your fingers. It’s a relentless film too, as Overgård overcomes one problem after the next you can’t help but wish the gods would give the poor man a break.

Mikkelsen’s performance, possibly the best of his career, is one of intense commitment, Overgård’s every emotion clear to read from Mikkelsen’s pained expressions and dog-tired eyes. Even taking movie magic into account, it’s clear Mikkelsen is doing much of what we see on screen. The moral conundrum at the heart of the story – should he save a woman he owes nothing to, potentially risking his own life, or take the ‘easy’ route and leave her for dead – is visualised in a handful of nexus point moments which Mikkelsen plays beautifully, while never losing sight of Overgård’s icy resolve.

For Joe Penna, a short filmmaker who rose to fame through his YouTube channel, this stands as a highly impressive feature debut – both technically accomplished and visually ambitious. The opening sequence, for example, is shot entirely with static cameras, giving the impression that Overgård is totally alone, not even a cameraman is lurking behind the lens. Shot with a primal eye for the harsh terrain of Iceland, there’s something mythical about the sight of Overgård setting out into the vast snowscape, nothing, but white as far as the eyes can see, his red puffer jacket the only burst of colour in the landscape. 

In the near complete absence of dialogue, Joseph Trapanese’s foreboding score adds dramatic clout, and is suitably stirring when required, but can feel a little manipulative. And, ultimately, there isn’t a great deal here that you haven’t seen before in different settings. It can all get a bit despairing at times too. When the umpteenth set back happens laughter takes precedence over fear. But for Mikkelsen’s performance alone it’s well worth seeking out. Penna’s next film, Stowaway, will be set on a spaceship destined for Mars. Start counting the days.

Looking for more Cannes Film Festival coverage? Why not read our review of similarly chilly competition entry Cold War (opens in new tab).

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“The second enemy of creativity, after having ‘good taste’, is being safe.”

So says Nicolas Winding Refn in his Director’s Note.

Well, one thing that can certainly be said for Only God Forgives is that it’s not safe.

At a point in his career, post – Drive , where he can do anything he pleases, Winding Refn here pushes his penchant for overt style, sparse dialogue and enigmatic meaning to breaking point and beyond.

Only God Forgives is, undoubtedly, a Nicolas Winding Refn movie, with all the tics and tropes we’ve come to expect and adore. But then To The Wonder is most certainly a Terrence Malick film, and, as with that movie, you here get the sense you’re witnessing an accumulation and summation.

The promise of a new direction is hugely appealing.

Set in Bangkok, the slight story sees Julian (Ryan Gosling) running a boxing club to front his drug business. His older brother, Billy (Tom Burke), rapes and kills a 16-year-old prostitute, and is himself killed by the girl’s father as an act of retribution.

Enter Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), a fearsome matriarch whose language is as colourful as her peroxide hair. She demands Julian in turn wreaks revenge for the murder of her first-born and favourite, a mission that will pitch him against mysterious ex-policeman Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).

Teasing extreme violence in its trailers and promo-clips, Only God Forgives in fact camouflages much of its bloodshed and instead relies on sound effects and after-shots. (A sudden close-up of an eye-slitting being the wince-inducing exception, Winding Refn appearing to cut tastefully away before returning unexpectedly).

No, the only boundaries the Danish director is here interested in pushing are those of form, with much of the picture rinsed in a neon colours, mostly red, and the camera zooming and panning an inch at a time.

The ornate set designs are Thai Lynch, the stately compositions and creeping camera enough to get Kubrick squirming impatiently on his cloud.

And then there’s Julian, all 17 lines of him, his close-mouthed motionlessness making Driver seem positively perky. OK, he wears the shit out of a suit while being beaten to a pulp and his trembling beauty will get hearts a-fluttering, but Gosling, like Winding Refn, is here taking his signature moves to the end of the line.

Expect a new persona when the actor’s self-imposed ‘retirement’ is over.

Only God Forgives is a failure but a rather magnificent failure, made on Refn’s own terms. It is a beautiful, hollow film, with the director’s insistence that Julian is fighting God – and that the film is about existential crisis – needing to be taken at its word.

For most, it simply comes down to this: it’s no Drive .

The post Only God Forgives reaction: Cannes 2013 – Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn reunite appeared first on Game News.

“Every time I arrive here it feels like the opening scene in La Dolce Vita ,” smiles Leonardo DiCaprio. Then he gets serious. “It’s a great honour to open the festival.”

The Great Gatsby has just lifted the curtain on Cannes, the world’s foremost film festival, and DiCaprio is sitting alongside director Baz Luhrmann at the press conference.

The actor of course plays title character Jay Gatsby, and flanking him are the rest of the principal players: Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson) and Jason Clarke (George Wilson).

“I think we’re all fascinated by Gatsby,” muses DiCaprio, who read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920s-set novel at school but only picked up on “the tragedy, the obsession… the existential power” upon returning to it for the film. “He’s an eternal dreamer, searching for meaning and identity. It really moved me. I was compelled to do this movie.”

“There was no list,” Luhrmann chips in. “Leo is like a detective, looking for that nuance, that shadow, the undetected.” No other actor, Luhrmann believes, could have portrayed “the American Hamlet.”

The Australian director also read the novel as a kid but rediscovered it, as an audio book, on a train journey 10 years ago. “It was us, where we are now,” he says of the precarious financial climate that backdrops the novel, with the friction between Gatsby’s new wealth and the Buchanans’ old money suggesting impending doom.

But very much at the foreground is the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy.

Not that any of it came easy. Luhrmann embarked on a 10-year journey to unlock the film rights and condense “a seven-hour read into two hours”. The research and cast discussions were also lengthy, Mulligan remembering, “He gave me six books on Zelda [ Fitzgerald’s wife and muse ] and told me to look at them!”

Being Baz, the director also needed to secure the rights to plenty of anachronistic music, landing the likes of Jay-Z, Beyonce and Will.i.am to score the party scenes.

Was it worth it? Luhrmann certainly thinks so, telling the story of how he was congratulated by an elegant woman who turned out to be Fitzgerald’s great-granddaughter at last week’s American premiere. She said Fitzgerald would have been “proud” and then added: “And by the way, I loved the music.”

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