Nicolas Winding Refn: "Dying was very interesting for me"

Special correspondent to the Cannes Film FestivalIn an edition of the Cannes Film Festival where, despite rumors, we finally haven't had a new film by Lars von Trier, the quota of extreme cinema that infuriates a good part of the press has been well covered by another Danish director who usually provokes as much indignation as enthusiasm: Nicolas Winding Refn has presented outside of competition the magnificent Her private hell, a further step in the path that increasingly distances him from conventional narrative cinema and from directing another Drive. The film is a freefall that takes to the extreme the aesthetic approach to the horror tale from the previous the previous The neon demon, with an even thinner plot and hieratic to operatic performances. After seeing what will surely be one of the most radical films of the festival, it is better understood why Thierry Frémaux did not feel he had the courage to program it in the official competition.

Winding Refn's return to cinema after a decade focused on television projects such as Too old to die young or Copenhagen cowboy is a kind of grotesque fashion film about the toxicity of patriarchy in which actresses are threatened by a supernatural killer, the Leather Man, who always arrives with the fog that creeps through the skyscrapers of the futuristic world where the action takes place. Her private hell sublimates the slasher genre from the logic of the fairy tale (monsters, witches, heroes) and embraces the hallucinated and almost abstract narrative of Italian giallo. The priority is not words but enhancing the effect of images and sound; in this sense, Winding Refn gives the deserved prominence to the stupendous soundtrack by Pino Donaggio, one of the great composers of horror cinema and a regular collaborator of Brian De Palma. And Winding Refn has not lost his touch when it comes to portraying violence on screen, which erupts suddenly and leaves you stuck to your seat.

In a cathartic press conference, Refn explained that Her private hell arose from connecting various ideas with a new concept of “interactive cinema” that he imagined “after having been dead for 25 minutes”. On this point, he revealed that doctors diagnosed him with a very serious heart problem (“leaking heart”) and operated on him with little hope of success. “Dying was very interesting – he joked –. Thank God my surgeon was Tom Cruise and he did an incredible job, he fixed my heart with his hands. I always thought I was a genius and it turns out he was the genius.” Overcoming the ordeal made him re-evaluate his life. “Maybe I have 25 years left, and I plan to make the most of them – he assured –. Time has become essential, time is everything. And if someone spends two hours watching one of my films, I have to make it worth it, that it serves to expand their horizons. I have children too…” Then Refn started crying and the attendees at the press conference applauded him for three emotional and cathartic minutes.

The director also spoke about Donaggio. “Suddenly I wanted to make an opera and I needed a composer, and Pino has always been a great inspiration – he explained –. But I didn't know if he was alive, so I looked him up on Google and saw that he was. I contacted him and told him I wanted an opera. He said yes. And that he had started his career with Nicolas Roeg and would end it with Nicolas Refn”. Donaggio, who was also in Cannes, added that Her private hell is the soundtrack that has taken the longest to make. “Nicolas is very demanding – he justified himself –. He wanted an opera, an important concert. So I wrote some themes and he chose the ones that play in the film. And he did it very well”.

Crime without punishment

Coincidences of life, the official competition has hosted the new film by another director who has overcome in recent years a near-fatal illness: the Russian Andrei Zvyagintsev, who suffered from long-term covid that left him paralyzed for a year and almost died due to lung damage. Zvyagintsev, who has exiled himself to Paris, describes his recovery in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter as "miraculous" and says he feels "extremely happy to have been resurrected". However, his cinema has not changed much: he remains immersed in the intense observation of the chiaroscuro of life in Russia through long sequences of slow rhythm and exhaustive attention to detail.

In Minotaur, Zvyagintsev makes a remake of Claude Chabrol's thrillerLa femme infidèle (1969), but transposing the story to present-day Russia –actually Latvia, for obvious reasons–, with the war in Ukraine as a backdrop. Based on the story of a businessman close to the regime whose wife cheats on him, the film X-rays the moral and structural crisis of a society in which the powerful do as they please and impunity is the norm. The 140 minutes of running time may be excessive, but Zvyagintsev's meticulous style has an immersive effect and amplifies the resonance of the dramatic twists. As if Dostoevsky had written Crime and Punishment in Putin's Russia, the film exudes a relevance and sense of timing that will surely lead it to feature in this edition's award winners.