Film - Jonathan Romney on a young Danish film-maker's diagnosis of male violence
Nicolas Winding Refn is one of those characters who started appearing on the international film festival circuit a few years ago - young movie buffs in skateboard shorts, with one feature to their credit and total confidence in their future as auteurs. Usually, these types are American, cloned directly from Quentin Tarantino's DNA; Refn is Danish and a big admirer of the national cinema's patriarch, Carl Theodor Dreyer. His genre intentions are sterner than first impressions suggest. His debut, Pusher (1996), may have seemed an archetypal guys-with-guns movie - a Copenhagen drug dealer watches his chances run out over seven desperate days - but it had a rigorous narrative drive, a dispassionate distance from its characters and a flair for the uncomfortable comedy of time-wasting inarticulacy.
Pusher could have been a great one-off, but Refn has a trilogy in mind; and the ambitious second part, though uneven, is even more impressive. There's cause to be wary at the start of Bleeder: a pair of sneakers stride along to 1970s pop, before we see their owner, a gormless-looking baseball-capped guy, and the caption "Lenny". Then it's another set of footwear and some ugly hard rock: "Leo". It's the old Trainspotting routine, you think, with sinking heart. But then the sequence goes on a little too long for comfort, as Refn introduces us to his main characters, their names all beginning with "L" - and we realise that he is pushing hip cliche to its breaking point.
The story, too, feels uncomfortably familiar. Lenny is a lonely video shop assistant, infatuated with Lea from the burger bar. Leo is a weary sulker, uneasy with his girlfriend Louise's announcement that she is pregnant. Her thug brother Louis hangs out with Leo and Lenny at regular lads-only screenings of their favourite junk movies. The film has its share of what we've come to know, with increasing weariness, as Tarantino moments. The men argue about action-movie heroes, but there is something tired and sad about the dialogue, in a way it would never be in a Tarantino film. In a wonderful, deceptively comic scene, Lenny gives a run-down of the video shop's contents, a rambling litany of pulp auteurs. Less certain of his knowledge, he needs help from his boss, Kitjo, to recite the more upmarket names relegated to the bottom shelf. Then Kitjo runs down the range of porn genres and sub-genres in stock: the best gag, which is probably much funnier for Danish audiences, is that the more lurid ones have to be named in English.
While the men are trapped in blinkered routine, Refn comes perilously close to idealising the women, if only by comparison. Lea is a voracious reader, and Refn contrasts the labyrinthine shelves of the video shop (Steadicam skimming feverishly along its aisles) with the equally cramped but oasis-like space of her favourite bookshop. The men's gang-style camaraderie always has an undercurrent of hostility, in contrast to the emotional openness in Louise's making friends with a young mother at the launderette.
We think the men are just loudmouths, until violence breaks out at a club. This tips the balance for confused, self-loathing Leo; he starts taking it out on Louise, which immediately puts her brother on his case. We feel some sort of sympathy for Lenny, but habit tells us that such a tunnel-vision film nerd isn't to be trusted - we can't help apprehending him nervously as a potential Travis Bickle. The only really sympathetic man is the sleazily coiffed video shop owner, ironically the one who tells Lenny to forget films and start appreciating nature.
Morten S0borg's widescreen photography evokes an ugly, claustrophobic world, shooting entirely in wide angle to describe the spaces between people. Corridors close in like tombs, empty vastness fills the screen. People lean away from each other at angles; walking side by side, they seem to be heading in opposite directions.
The excellent acting looks all the more intelligent if you have seen Pusher, which created the illusion that people were simply being themselves. In fact, Mads Mikkelson, who was Pusher's speedfreak racist, here becomes the vacant, gentle Lenny. Pusher's terrifying Serb heavy (Zlatko Buric) becomes the relatively sane Kitjo. Pusher's bullishly overconfident anti-hero was played by Kim Bodnia: his Leo is a lumbering, used-up shadow of that character.
Bleeder doesn't quite sustain itself - once Leo's violence breaks out and we move into a revenge plot, the everyday banality that sustains the first hour takes a virulently sordid, even Jacobean turn that threatens to compromise the film's drift. Refn's diagnosis of the violent male malaise may not itself be that original, but he goes about it with a powerful sense of what images mean to the people who consume them and then act them out. When Leo first points a gun at someone, we're aware - and presumably so is he - of the film-still stereotype he is reproducing. It is identical to countless gangster images that are increasingly being used uncritically in British film. Our own current hard-man icon is Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels cameo player Vinnie Jones, whose scowling reassurance at the recent Brit Awards that a heckler was "fuckin' sorted" earned him a round of applause and an admiring kiss from the presenter Davina McCall. Maybe Refn should come over for his third episode and take on British macho culture with a film called Geezer.
"Bleeder" (18) opens nationwide from 24 March
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