Drive

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a difficult film to place. When presented at Cannes it was welcomed for being simple unpretentious entertainment, but then when looked at as a populist genre piece Drive becomes subversive and intelligent. The film’s ambiguous identity was also apparent in the production process, as after initially being labelled a blockbuster was eventually released as an independent film. But amid this confusion, one thing that is for certain is that Drive is an excellent film.

Set in LA, the story follows an unnamed garage worker (played by Ryan Gosling) with a passion and talent for driving, who, we learn in a breathtaking opening sequence, by night works as a criminal get-away driver. He falls in love with neighbour Irine (Carey Mulligan), and when her husband (Oscar Isaac) returns home from jail the driver finds himself wound up in his debt problems with the mob.

Part of the film’s strange identity is the amount of other films it draws similarities with. As a heist film centred on a character with a passion for cars there are obvious parallels to The Driver and Steve McQueen’s Bullit, but there are also less obvious links to the controversial Irreversible’s sudden outbursts of violence, last year’s critically acclaimed Animal Kingdom’s tone of impending doom and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing’s heist plot and noir aesthetics, among many others.

Perhaps the truest comparison though is with Taxi Driver. Both films feature a protagonist who is defined by their occupation of driving, and both possess a quietly psychotic menace with a violent streak bubbling under the surface. Both are motivated by the desire to help certain women and children, in Taxi Driver a child prostitute and in Drive Irene and her son. The films even share a cast member in Albert Brooks, who in Drive adopts the unlikely role of violent mobster Bernie. And there is also a nod to the ending of Taxi Driver that ironically depicts Travis Bickle as a hero.

Whether the unnamed Driver is a hero or not is one of the intriguing questions of the film. That he obviously resembles Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, with his mysterious background, calm, almost silent exterior and toothpick always in mouth suggests he is a hero of a kind, and Refn has gone as far to call the drier a superhero. But, unlike Eastwood and more like Bickle, his acts of violence are more gruesome and more difficult to condone.

But it would be a mistake to linger too long on the character’s morality, as this film’s main strengths and focus is its fun, stylish look. An array of slow, lingering, unrushed shots – much like the spaghetti westerns featuring the Man With No Name – shows up the majority of Hollywood thrillers and their obsession with frantic cuts and unrestrained action. Complementing the cinematography is Cliff Martinez’s 80s-esque synth soundtrack, which adds further to the film’s retro feel.

Drive then in an intriguing and curious picture that should appeal to both the arthouse and blockbuster crowd, and is undoubtedly one of the films of the year so far.

See Drive at York City Screen. Go to http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/York_Picturehouse/ for more information

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