After
hitting viewers in the face with a bloody machete and then some with the
previous and still very shocking episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s television
series Too Old to Die Young, where do
you go from there? Why, into outer space
including but not limited to rituals involving soda pop, silver eyes, “the
beings”, and last but not least, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.
While
continuing the series where it left off with the same set of characters, for
the first half of the ninth episode entitled The Empress the Danish provocateur seems to be screwing with the
audience by taking the series very briefly into orbit. With the audience left battered and broken by
what they witnessed in The Hanged Man,
our minds are disoriented just enough for the writer-director to introduce
elements and rules that should not be associative with this series, making you
wonder how we arrived in the strange and oddly wonderful netherworld of Refn’s
making.
By
now, the cartel is establishing a stronghold of the Los Angeles crime scene
with Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) presenting himself by now as an openly bisexual
gangster with an extraordinary sequence of Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) donning him
in female makeup. Simultaneously
psychic/godmother Diana (Jena Malone) seems to be taken on some kind of
psychological journey that appears to be…extraterrestrial? Occult?
From the depths of a flame filled Hell or of a secret society? Refn doesn’t tell. Dance and singing factors heavily in this series
with a live performance for Yaritza and Jesus that is every bit as surreal as
Damian’s meditative dance from Episode 6.
Meanwhile
Viggo (John Hawkes) wages what appears to be an all-out war against a hideout
of rapists and pedophiles which unfolds in a series of abstract images of
explosions, swaths of neon-fluorescent colors, Santa Claus, full frontal male
nudity, and as aforementioned, Antonioni’s much maligned masterwork Zabriskie Point. For those of you who recall Antonioni’s take
on late 1960s counterculture, critics and audiences simply did not get that
movie though Refn’s channeling of that film’s climactic and captivating energy
plays like a nightmarish gift from God.
Episode
8 of Too Old to Die Young left
viewers in a state of catatonia and blaringly loud notes of apocalypse. Despite the bizarre and otherworldly opening
half of Episode 9 The Empress, the series
alas finally starts to offer a glimmer of hope for redemption in Refn’s
underworld gone wildly mad. Visually
this is some of the greatest work the Danish filmmaker has ever fashioned and
the closing scenes feel right at home with the famous dinner exchange in
Michael Mann’s Heat. Thus far this has been a rough and tough
journey for this longtime Refn disciple but the sweet rewards starting to
present themselves nearing the end of this series are well worth the bloody and
brutal wait.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki