The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, for example, prized the film, and for this writer, it was a disturbing counterpoint to the more commercial Drive – if that film was a sun-drenched dream in which Ryan Gosling played an archetypal male hero, then Only God Forgives is the nightmare: a view of machismo gone horribly awry. The upheaval of the experience is evident from the very beginning, as Refn relocates his family to a plush high-rise apartment near the film’s location in Bangkok. The director wavers between excitement at his new project – no doubt bolstered by Gosling, who remains an upbeat presence throughout – and utter despair. At one point, he has a producer on video link to reassure him that the film he’s making is even a worthwhile one. There are funny and revealing incidental moments here and there. Corfixen captures Refn between takes on his movie, mulling over production problems and trying to find last-minute fixes when an action sequence refuses to pan out. Elsewhere, Refn manages to convince Gosling to join him at a film festival, where the organisers have agreed to pay cash if the pair show up and introduce a screening of Drive – the proceeds, Refn says, can go towards Only God Forgives’ dwindling production coffers. In one glorious moment, Cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky shows up to read give Refn and Corfixen a tarot card reading. At a shade under 60 minutes, My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn also feels frustratingly undernourished (other than a trailer, the DVD is also devoid of extras). Amid all the domestic tension, we’re given only brief glimpses of Refn’s activities on set, and the film could have benefitted from more of them – and certainly more from the mercurial, mischievous Jodorowsky. What is interesting about Corfixen’s documentary, however, is its perspective on Refn himself. In public, he often carries himself as a confident, aloof and slightly arrogant auteur; in private, he seems fretful, sometimes bad-tempered, but also disarmingly gentle – an ordinary human being, in short. But the film fails to connect the artist back to his work; it offers no context to the film he’s even making. What made him write it? Why Bangkok? At what point did he begin to lose faith in it? The documentary’s narrative starts too late in the production to answer those questions. My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn is out on DVD now in the UK. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
