Study in purple pants – Weekend – Kommersant
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Dane Nicolas Winding Refn returns to his homeland as a real American and instead of Scandi noir shoots a superhero comic strip torn off the ground.
In 2019, Danish nugget Refn, who successfully works in Hollywood, who signs his work in the credits simply NWR, directed the first series Too Old to Die Young. This outstanding kunshtuk was too radical for streaming television not to die after the first season, Amazon didn’t renew it. Self-confident Refn, presenting the series in Cannes, said that the biological father of his wife Liv Korfisen, they say, is Fritz Lang and this led him to the idea of making long films “like a father-in-law”. Lang is there or not Lang (by the time Liv was born, the master was 82), but Refn did not abandon the idea of shooting long, and three years later he made the Copenhagen Cowboy series, no less radical in its recklessness, for Netflix.
This is a typical Refn (an indistinct plot that develops terribly slowly, eye-catching neon blue-purple lighting, surreal images) with only one amendment – instead of a silent superhero-avenger, the heroine Miu (Angela Bundalovich) is in focus. A mysterious girl with a boyish haircut, who does not get out of her tracksuit, lives as a living mascot in a Copenhagen brothel owned by an Albanian. Miu was bought by his elderly Serbian sister to bring her luck in her hopeless attempts to get pregnant by her Danish husband Sven, who has a habit of getting on all fours and grunting when his disgruntled wife flogs him with a whip. After escaping from these nice people, Miu finds herself in a new pigsty – Mother Hulda’s Chinese restaurant (Li Yi Zhang), which is run by bandits and forced to feed the corpses of those who died in the mafia slaughter to the pigs. But even here, the enigmatic heroine does not find peace and is hired to work for drug dealers under the patronage of the Balkan mafia boss Miroslav (Zlatko Buric) in order to rescue the kidnapped daughter of Hulda from captivity. At the same time, the avenging maiden deals with a family of aristocratic vampires living in their own estate in the suburbs of Copenhagen and drinking the blood of lost virgins all from the same Albanian brothel.
The plot only at first glance looks like delirium: it’s just that NWR is an artist, and this is how he sees the chaos reigning between modern social classes. If Lynch once reinvented the detective and the soap opera, turning them into a mystical scary tale, then Refn cuts it out of a social drama. The Scandinavians have been filming film noirs for several decades, starting from the idea that the most just social order in the world of the northern states is a fake that hides terrible social sores. And now the newly-minted “son-in-law” of Fritz Lang falls on the same soil, who has not yet cooled down from overseas success and last shot at home 15 years ago, and cuts out of the same material, the good old Danish “social program”, a surreal parable about good and evil .
His retarded superpowered heroine calls her enemies to her with an action hero gesture and can easily kick her feet (superstrength is superstrength, but that’s why she always walks around in sweatpants?). But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen action scenes like a fight in a pig pen lit by a deathly blue neon light. In this light, the two main metaphors of the series shine: men, according to Refn, are still pigs, shamelessly exploiting female beauty and selfhood, and the rich, the elite and the cream of society are vampires sucking the blood of the people.
As for Denmark as a state of universal justice, Refn does not believe in it: “I believe in free education and medicine. But I don’t believe in equality. In Denmark, it is called janteloven (“the law of the city of Jante” from Axel Sandemuse’s novel about a fictional commune where no one stood out from the crowd). Don’t try to rise above the crowd. If you say, “I’m the best,” you will be punished.” Refn understands everything about his compatriots, but prefers to go his own way and instead of Scandi noir shoots a story according to American patterns: “The main value in America is success, so no one will pick you up when you fall, because for you this is an incentive for what to achieve.” Apparently, the “cowboy from Copenhagen” is Refn himself, who rode back to his homeland to play by someone else’s rules. The TV-discoverer himself is clearly setting himself the ambitious goal of getting Netflix to shoot the next season – evidence of this is the open ending of Cowboy and the storyline for the sequel. Hence the viscous, marking time plot, which does not want to open up right away, lay out all the trump cards and sing like it’s the last time. But, as one American observer rightly remarked, “it’s a TV newbie’s mistake to make a season assuming you’ll get a second.”
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