With his latest project, Copenhagen Cowboy, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn – who has recently been using NWR more often to facilitate consistent and concise branding – seems to be at a crucial turning point on several fronts.
Back in his native Denmark for the first time since 2005, working under the constraints of Covid, settling into streaming mini-series at a time that took him from Amazon to Netflix, and having recently turned 50, he’s got the point reached at which most artists could take personal stock and, as a result, progress in a meaningful way. Reading liberally of the flattened arc of his career posits that not having done so is a testament to the clarity and power of his polarizing but undeniably unique vision. With a relentless belief in his style and his favorite subjects, he’s trained every reason to change and stuck to his bright neon Serbian gangsters, Thai martial artists, skimpy avenging angels, POV insertions of hands, and abandoned rave lighting schemes.
The less charitable take would be believable that Refn’s included strengths and weaknesses don’t match the sprawling six-hour running time, which only serves to create more space between the flashes of frighteningly intense beauty that propelled him into the ranks of the A-League -Arthouse writers. Feature-length (as in his 2011 masterpiece Drive), he can punctuate the long stretches of silent formalists with jabs of sadistic violence or arresting compositions at intervals frequent enough to captivate an audience. But when stripped of any demands for conciseness, he gives in to his tendency to turgidity, lengthening each part with endless interludes of 360-degree camera pans over a group of wordless stoics. However small Refn’s return may be, it is littered with too many intriguing moments to ignore him entirely; even and precisely because of this personal stagnation, he has become a slippery quantity to pin down, his remaining talents at odds with his lack of interest in furthering them. He’s the same rascal, the growth is instead taking place in an audience arguing if he’s still worth the patience.
Refn’s active disdain for the rhythms of serial television is evident in the loose sequence of actions that could be broadly defined as a storyline that is captivating on paper and nearly endless in practice. Dressed in an androgynous Finn Wolfhard haircut and a blue tracksuit that she wears like Superman’s spandex, our heroine Miu (Angela Bundalovic, who skillfully plays the slate-faced cipher) is a “living talisman” with supernatural qualities that make her a… valuable quantity for Denmark make criminal underground. It’s been passed down as property from one sinister creep to the next, from a gangster matriarch hoping to conceive, to another black-market pornographer Refn loves so much, to a family of Aryan psychopaths who may also have vampiric DNA bear in themselves. Incredibly, little of it plays as interestingly on screen, the muddy subject matter sterilized by an icy gruff that treats paperback thrills as a momentous clash between old good and evil.
The notion that Miu’s thrashing parade has an elemental basis – a parallel track on the astral plane to her retaliatory warpath on Earth – only gains a sly visual representation in the final episode, during a fight that pairs each blow with a distorted slash. Sock sound effect bridging the gap between our dimension and the non-real. Refn delivers something we’ve never seen before, only after spending hours spending more of the same, a drudgery acidified by scant indulgences: Cliff Martinez’s throbbing synthpop score, exactly a dose of hilarity in the form of a disastrously incompetent coke deals, which Refn himself takes part in in a cheeky cameo, some sneaky visual equivalences between humans and pigs. (Although the latter is a bit more difficult to understand if someone has educated on the on-set incident in which a pig actor was shot and killed on purpose.)
Refn has admitted that the title has nothing to do with the content of the show, admitting that the phrase ‘Copenhagen Cowboy’ came to mind before he started writing, adding: ‘I just like the two words together “. His creative logic really doesn’t get much more complex than that, the simple pursuit of any signifier in an increasingly warmed-up sensibility to cool tickling his imagination. With the support of these famously outspoken streamer executives, he could very well spend the rest of his days shining purple lights on chiseled torsos adorned with badass tattoos, occasionally stumbling into moments of transcendence. But he’s also hinted at a return to cinema as the next step, a welcome influence on his focus in its forced conciseness. Like the unstoppable Miu, his unwieldy and unpredictable powers are most reliably activated under duress.