Kazakhstan's box office has received 'Her Personal Hell' — the new film by cult Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. The picture was shown earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival out of competition, and for Refn it marks a long-awaited return to big-screen filmmaking — his first in nearly 10 years since the fashion thriller 'The Neon Demon' and a hiatus spent working on TV series. A few years ago, the director survived clinical death, which inevitably influenced 'Her Personal Hell.' What difficulties might an unprepared viewer face, and who wins the battle between style and substance? Read on in Kursiv's review. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
Young actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) arrives in a city (likely Japanese) shrouded in neon lights and fog to take part in a film shoot. Her father Johnny (Dougray Scott) seems to be involved, but their relationship is tense and far from healthy. He soon leaves his daughter, hoping she will bond with her co-star and stepmother Dominique (Gavana Rose Lu). Before leaving, he tells her a horror story about a maniac nicknamed the Leather Man, who roams the streets searching for his own daughter and brutally kills young women. Another foreigner in the city is obsessed with meeting him — heroic American private Kay (Charles Melton), whose child was taken by the Leather Man.
Nicolas Winding Refn is the second most prominent contemporary Danish director after Lars von Trier (interestingly, Refn's father Anders is a longtime collaborator of von Trier, working on films ranging from 'Dogville' to 'Nymphomaniac'). Both are drawn to screen violence and aesthetic provocations. But while Trier is a devoted admirer of Andrei Tarkovsky, the creator of 'Drive' and 'The Neon Demon' has always gravitated toward lower (but no less flamboyant) genres — the category known as exploitation and grindhouse. In this context, Italy holds special interest for him: it was not only the birthplace of intellectual cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti but also a factory producing a wide range of mass content, from detective stories to pornography.
In 'Her Personal Hell,' which is about 90 percent quotations (even the title is borrowed from an old British erotic film), half of which actually reference Refn's own work, there are also nods to highbrow classics. For instance, the storyline of a campy sci-fi film Elle participates in somewhat resembles the meta-plot of Federico Fellini's '8½' — where, as we recall, Marcello Mastroianni's character also unsuccessfully tried to work on such a picture. But here the genealogy is slightly different. The main reference point is giallo, a special genre of Italian detective horror cinema and a precursor to American slashers.
Its essence can be described as follows: a mysterious killer in a mask (and often black gloves, as in Refn; here they are additionally studded with diamonds, turning into a true valuable artifact) brutally murders very beautiful women. The most famous giallo director is Dario Argento (incidentally, it was often his hands that 'played' the role of the maniac's hands on screen — another peculiar joke about filmmaking, but darker than Fellini's), for whom lavish style sometimes mattered more than content — simple tales of encountering evil, seasoned with pop psychology. Or style became the content itself.
All of this (in abundance!) is present in Refn, who is thus engaged in multi-figure stylization. Without understanding the giallo context, 'Her Personal Hell' will likely bring little cinephilic pleasure, if we speak in such categories — it is also worth mentioning that the music was composed by 84-year-old genre veteran Pino Donaggio (in an interview, Refn admits he had to Google whether Donaggio was still alive before contacting him), who worked with Argento. It is tempting to reduce the film to a nearly two-hour music video. Music indeed plays a huge role here, and the loosely connected plot is deliberately uneventful and seemingly meaningless — one should go to the cinema primarily for the so-called vibe.
Many critics have rushed to label 'Her Personal Hell' a creative failure, arguing that the director used to do the same thing but much better, and now he simply has nothing to say. It is also easy to argue that the film looks like a neural-network product based on Refn's overused images and themes (sex, violence, neon, glitter, and so on) — this is indeed the author's signature raised to the absolute.
In stylish settings that could easily find a place in an Almaty contemporary art museum, either a maximally low-grade 'B-movie' or a true ancient tragedy unfolds — a story borrowing dozens of things from everywhere, seemingly deliberately avoiding interpretations, mockingly offering, for example, heavy Freudian motifs. What do we have before us? A captured transgressive experience of the underworld after the director's clinical death? A fetishistic collection of Pinterest frames soaked in male gaze?
Perhaps, above all, it is an unexpectedly sentimental family message. Refn dedicated 'The Neon Demon' to his wife, model Liv Corfixen; now it is the turn of his daughters, who nearly lost their father. By the end, this session of aesthetic masturbation, which will obviously be uncomfortable for others to share (in my case, of the rare four people in the hall, only two stayed until the finale, including me), suddenly turns into a rather bright fairy tale — with a happy ending, appearing here as if against the twice-mentioned story by the director's compatriot Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Little Match Girl.' Small spoiler: Refn chose to arm his determined heroine with a hatchet.