BLEEDER, Nicholas Winding Refn's 2nd feature film

BLEEDER (1999)
D. Nicholas Winding Refn
Import DVD
1.85

After I saw the movie DRIVE this year I became a little obsessed with seeing other films from director Nicholas Winding Refn. I had previously seen BRONSON (2010) which I was very impressed with, and had caught up with his Viking epic VALHALLA RISING (2011) just before seeing DRIVE. But I had not seen any of his older films from when he was primarily still working overseas. So I took a plunge and placed a large order from Amazon UK (grabbed some other dvd's I had been looking for too) and picked up this one and his PUSHER trilogy. This was the first of that bundle I watched and I was suitably impressed.

BLEEDER is a street level drama about a group of friends and how their lives change when the core couple of the group become pregnant. Leo (Kim Bodnia) and Lea (Live Corfixen) have discovered they are going to have a baby, but Leo really lacks the maturity to handle the situation. He hangs out with his video store owning buddies Lenny (Mads Mikkelson who went on to play the villain in CASINO ROYAL) and Kitjo (Zlatko Burik) watching movies all night long, or trailing behind Lea's fairly dangerous brother, low level gangster Louis (Levino Jensen). Louis is not crazy about Leo anyway and he can sense that he is unhappy about the new situation. But as things progress, Leo begins to slip into a sort of psychosis, growing more and more reckless and dangerous, making bad decisions as if to purposefully cause problems for himself until it hits the middle of the film and a huge problem that will impact them all.

The second tier of the story is less tense, and what I suspect is more personal to the director. Lenny, who is obsessed with movies and practically lives at his job at the video story has fallen for the pretty girl who works at the greasy spoon diner around the corner. The problem is that he has no personal communication skills at all. All he can do is talk movies. His friends are used to him, but in the real world his is awkward, even backward to the point that he might even be suffering from Aspergers or mild Autism. His only connection to the real world is through what he knows in the thousands and thousands of movies he watches. So he struggles to connect to this girl, who is actually not too different than he is, because she loves books in much the same way.

The first part of the story grows increasingly tense as the characters play out the situations until it reaches the last act of the film and why it is called BLEEDER. It is not what you think, I guarantee it, and it is far more disturbing that you imagine, But it is thankfully tempered by the second story of Lenny's quest to connect with this young lady.

The movie is told with a constant roving camera, almost always on a steady cam, but never obtrusive, and like his later films, using modern music as a way to punctuate the proceedings and introduce characters and give them an immediate voice. This was Refn's second feature film but his vocabulary was already in place.As his acting company, almost all who were in PUSHER and return here playing mostly very different characters than in that film.

One thing that I will say I have found a little frustrating with his films is that they tend to be a little light on the female character's motivations. He simply doesn't write the most detailed females. His male characters are always fully developed and complex, while his females are always kind of by the wayside, or just plot mechanics to move things forward. With that said, BLEEDER is the one film of the bunch I have watched of his work that suffers the LEAST in this aspect with the two female characters being pretty close to fully formed here. Much more so than the women in BRONSON and PUSHER for sure.

Right now BLEEDER is the hardest of his films to see, but it is for certain worth the effort.

Review

© Andrew Copp

Day #20 you've been SNUFFED OUT!

It is all beginning to blur...


SNUFF 2000 (2002)
D. Borja Crespo
?????
1.85

This highly stylized, pop art short film was written by Spanish underground comic bad boy Miguel Angel Martin. An ultra-black comedy, it takes the worst bad taste idea, snuff films, and tries to find the lighter side of them. Or at least take the piss out of the the nasty urban legend surrounding them by pointing out that the of uber-nerd splatter gore geek that would actually seek one out would be too busy talking about how cool it was to even watch the damn thing.

The movie starts in a garish, day-glow colored room with a nearly nude pregnant woman bound in front of two digital video camera linked to a computer (which has, for some reason, a CGI bug crawling across the keyboard). The men, one in a white button up shirt, the other in a skin tight rubber S+M outfit, and both wearing gas masks that are hot purple, are making a film that clearly is going to climax in her death. The offhandedly discuss the scene at hand. The man in the button up shirt tells the other one:

"First you cut open her big belly and tear the fetus out. Then you fuck her."

To which he replies:

"I'll killer her and tear out the fetus. But I'm not going to fuck her. I wont fuck a pregnant woman. It turns me off."


The other guy reminds him that they have made movies where he has fucked all kinds of animals, kids, and even dead people, but he won't fuck a pregnant woman? But his friend stands firm saying that pregnant women just turn him off, that he can't get hard for them. The conversation goes on to making a film about fucking mothers just like "big" Ed Kemper did while the woman shivers in terror behind them, waiting to die on camera. Finally, the first guy steps up with a pair of hedge clippers like used in the movie THE BURNING and we hear him tearing into her.

We cut to a living room that's equally as pop art designed as the snuff chamber, with purple and bright hot pinks coloring everything. Two twenty-something men are sitting on a pink couch watching a snuff movie with the two previous men in it beating a different woman. One of the guys proclaims it "boring" because it has no flair or grace. His friend reminds him that it's like that because it's a snuff movie and therefore real. But the guy doesn't care, it's missing that cinematic quality that gets him moving. His friend then explains that the movie's an exact re-enactment of the murders of one Gerald Schaefer, a Florida Serial killer who was also a writer, and that the cops used his fictional writings to help convict him. The friends have a good laugh and the more obnoxious of the two asks for the video with the "pregnant women" because that one was "really good".

Outside of the insane pop art sensibility, which is clearly imitating Miguel Angel Martin's very specific artwork and style, this is about as dark of a satire as you can get: looking at perverse subject matter and murder with a jaundiced eye and judging it as pure banality. Murder and snuff are just work, and in turn, just background noise on TV that's ultimately just not interesting enough to even get up off of the couch and change the tape for.

The movie is followed up by a second short that's written, directed, and starring the same team about 12 rules to not getting caught if you are a serial killer. Several of these are easily recognized from HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, when Henry is explaining to Otis how not to get caught, but the actual list dates from around that same period of time as several fanzines in the 1980's that were riding that whole Aesthetic terrorism wave. I remember seeing it in at least three zines myself, including SEWER CUNT (only had one issue, but that one issue had enough offensive and rude content to make it all worthwhile), MURDER CAN BE FUN, and FATAL VISION (I'm going by memory on those last two, but I'm almost positive). It also appeared on the San Francisco Public Access show GUTTERVISION (which if ANYONE has tapes of DVD's of get a a hold of me, we have trading to do!). This short is well made enough, but as you can see the content is not exactly groundbreaking, or even shocking, by 2002 when this was made.



Reviews © Andy Copp