Gotham Diary:
Thaitles
8 January 2014
After dinner last night, while Kathleen pored over documents in the living room, I retired to my easy chair in the blue room. There I watched one of three new DVDs in my collection, none of which could be described as funny.
Somewhere along the line, when the movie came out and was showing in the theatres, I missed the part about how foreign Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is. Foreign to everything except, arguably, the aesthetic of David Lynch. I thought of Eraserhead a lot. I thought of Mulholland Drive. I even thought of Dune. Among other tics, Refn indulges the Lynchian penchant for hypnotic still shots: if the camera stares long enough, something will be revealed. I’m still waiting.
I could also see — and this was somewhat more helpful in trying to come to terms with the new movie — how Only God Forgives proceeds from Drive, both as a narrative and as a vehicle for Ryan Gosling. In both, Mr Gosling plays characters who are forced into uncongenial contexts by personal attachments. The attachment to the young mother next door, in Drive, was beautifully expressed; Carey Mulligan was the perfect match for a love affair that was somehow made lighter than air by its very hopelessness.
The attachment in Only God Forgives is wildly different, and I’m not sure that it is even competently expressed, much less well done. That’s because Only God Forgives is made for a mongrel audience. The English-speaking characters are there to attract Americans interested in indie film. They may be there to attract other audiences as well, but the long and the short of it is that the film would never find American distributorship without stars of the magnitude of Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas. Ms Scott Thomas plays the attachment here. She is Mr Gosling’s character’s mother. That’s what we’re asked to believe, anyway.
Bear in mind that both actors, while very successful and justly celebrated, like to play unusual parts from time to time. Mr Gosling’s Julian is an extension of Lars Lindstrom, of Lars and the Real Girl. He’s a quietly damaged man who doesn’t say much. It is hard to see Ms Scott Thomas’s Crystal as an extension of anything that she has done before. Perhaps, way back in the beginning, when she had supporting roles in long-forgotten French movies, she did something like Crystal. Maybe. But the odds are that you’ve never seen her like this.
“Like this”: conjure up Donatella Versace — the long, straight, ingenuine-looking hair; the pouty eye makeup; the attitude of profound discontent. While you’re doing that, completely forget Kristin Scott Thomas’s richly modulated speaking voice, and replace it with something shrill, monotone, and perhaps even untalented. The voice of someone like Jane Forth, perhaps, or someone else from Andy Warhol’s production company. One of the less reflective characters in John Waters’s oeuvre, perhaps. Like someone really unpleasant from Long Island.
Because, if Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas appear in this movie to appeal (in part) to American audiences, they do not perform for it. They act as if for viewers who don’t speak English, viewers who regard English-speaking Americans as exotic monstrosities with too much money and no common sense. Viewers in East Asia, let’s just say.
The titles are in Thai, by the way. The hero of the story — he’s more like a god than a hero, really — is a somewhat dough-faced police agent played by Vithaya Pansringarm, an actor who burst upon the scene, as it were, two or three years ago, starring in his own screenplay, Mindfulness and Murder, directed by Tom Waller but otherwise a Thai film. Mr Pansringarm’s day job — featured in a sweet little scene (all the more a standout), in which his character dances alone with a long knife — is ballet.
Ballet is as good a way to approach Only God Forgives as any. The most appealing element, overall, is its score, by Cliff Martinez. This is not one of those scores that you’re not supposed to notice while you’re watching the film. Both minimalist and assertive, it took me back all the way to American Gigolo.
Am I sorry to have bought the DVD? Not at all — I’m a KST completist. (Although I have yet to buy Bel Ami; I’m still smarting from that experience.) The next item on my goddess queue is Man to Man, which is not about pretty men on a beach but rather about field anthropologists and pygmies a century ago. Seen it?
***
It was supposedly very cold out today, but it did feel anywhere near as — depraved; that’s what the temperature was, yesterday: depraved. I had to go out for yet more doctoring, and I ran a few errands after lunch, arriving back home with just about as much as I could carry, and not another step.
Gristede’s, across the street, has dismantled the freezer shelf in which Jones’s sausages were stocked. Whether the shelf is going to be reactivated, no one could tell me. I’m making a note of it just in case this is the Beginning of the End for Gristede’s, which, I predicted, John Catsimatidis would lose little time closing down — the chain, I mean, not just the Gristede’s across the street — if he did not win the mayoral election. This was not a genuinely conditional prediction, as the “if” clause could be taken for granted.
They say that the old Food Emporium space downstairs is going to become a CVS. I’ve been in only one CVS, and that was long ago, up in New Milford. Here in town I patronize Duane Reade exclusively, not that there’s anything exclusive about them; there’s one on every corner. It’s all so boring. Speaking of which! Ray Soleil and I noticed the other day that a new restaurant, called The Writing Room of all things, is setting up in the space formerly occupied by Elaine’s. I never went to Elaine’s, not once, in thirty years of living around the corner, but I’ll probably give The Writing Room a try, before it does whatever it’s going to do. I wonder if they’ll deliver?