Refn: Bronson (2008)

Nicholas Winding Refn’s crossover hit and first English language film is based on the life of notorious English prisoner Charles Bronson, although it’s not a biopic in any conventional sense. Instead, Refn presents Bronson’s movement from petty theft, to imprisonment, to twenty years in solitary confinement, as a pastiche of ultra-masculine genres – prison films, boxing films, kitchen sink films, crime films, action films, vigilante films – to the point where the film plays as a catalogue of poses, or postures, or at least a series of mise-en-scenes and set pieces designed to showcase the muscular male body in the most fetishistic, flattering light. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that the effect of piling all those genres on top of each other is that none of them feels adequate – or all of them feel impotent, as if Refn were trying to recoup the intense hit of masculinity that genre films once afforded, and to lure back the male demographic that might once have sought genre films as a way of vicariously flexing their muscles. And, in many ways, it’s a genre film made for an age in which cinema has lost a great deal of that vicarious power, superseded by all the avatars lurking around the synthetic fringes of Refn’s vision, as if to remind you how much more effective this might feel as a first-person gamer, a tendency embraced further in Only God Forgives. In this case, though, Refn takes that lurking digital impotence as a challenge to re-embody the male genre film – a challenge that he addresses most powerfully when he draws on Bronson’s fitness books and programs, rather than his insistence on being a vaudevillain, which gets monotonous pretty quickly. Great swathes of the film play as a workout guide, or a demonstration of what a good workout guide can get you, as if prescient that a certain male demographic now works out for the same reasons they might have seen a genre film back in the day, just as the gym has come to eclipse the cinema as a site of male hysteria and anxiety. In fact, it often literally feels designed to attract audiences who might otherwise be at the gym – or to be played at gyms – as Refn concedes that genre films can no longer be satisfied to supply masculinity vicariously; this is a film that actually wants to provide you with a workout, or at least make you feel as insidiously inadequate as the most effective personal trainer, while Hardy’s Bronson is little more than a bodybuilding catalogue made over as an arthouse film, suffused with the high-end brute chic of a boutique fashion spread. Fists perpetually clenched, ready to punch his way out of every situation, there’s no thought or perception that doesn’t have to traverse a thick seam of muscle before it eventuates, which is pretty much the position Refn puts us in as viewers, in one of the most exhausting, exhausted genre films in recent years.