Film Review | Red, White and Blue, dir. Simon Rumley

As you might expect, Red, White & Blue is a film of three parts. A cinematic triptych of sorts, about "three lives... bound together in blood," at least according to the one-sheet. In fact that turns out to be a more literal description of this film's disconnected narrative about connectedness than you might expect, going in.

It's going to be difficult to talk about Red, White & Blue without spoiling the hell out of it, but I'll give it my best shot. Erica (Amanda Fuller) is... a nymphomaniac. In the urban wilderness of Austin, Texas, she trawls the sleaziest clubs and bars she knows, and goes home with the sleaziest man - or men - she can. Once her business with them is concluded, she leaves, never to return; disgusted with herself, one senses.

Erica has a few rules: she'll never sleep with the same guy twice, nor will she bed anyone she halfway respects. So Nate (bit-part player Noah Walsh in an astonishing turn) is out of luck. Or perhaps he's in luck. In any event, Nate doesn't feel particularly lucky. Particularly in light of their burgeoning friendship, the cold shoulder Erica gives him, despite the fact that she'll go home with pretty much anyone else, given half a chance, leaves Nate feeling conflicted about the crazy aimless girl who lives down the hall. More than a little baffled by her behaviour when all signs point towards the beginning of a love that could last.

But Nate's a patient sort of a fellow - an Iraq war veteran the CIA are apparently head-hunting - and eventually, one night, Erica explains herself. Sometime later, one of the hundred-some men she's slept with comes a-calling. That would be Franki. Franki (Mark Senter) has a band, a beautiful ex-girlfriend, a dream, and a mother recovering from cancer.

He's also the weak link in Red, White & Blue. Senter's performance as Franki did not convince me for a single, solitary second: not until the brutal endgame does he seem anything more than a cipher in sheep's clothing... and even then.

Assuredly Senter does not inhabit his character in the way Walsh does his, and Fuller hers. But perhaps the bar they set is simply too high, for on the other hand, their turns are truly remarkable. Erica and Nate are both fundamentally broken people, in whom Walsh and Fuller invest a certain haunting poignancy; they are each to their own irreparably damaged individuals whose respective injuries Rumley guards closely till the moments of his choosing.

And - again, without giving the game away - though I understand the rationale, I found Rumley's abrupt cutaways from moments of revelation and pivotal character development frustrating rather than intriguing, as I expect they were meant to be. One of the first rules of storytelling is that you should not obfuscate vital elements of the narrative you're layering for no other reason than to artificially induce confusion where otherwise there would be none, and Red, White & Blue runs aground of that guidance on every occasion it can, as if to prove a point.

That said, Red, White & Blue does not quite collapse under the weight of its own ostensible cleverness, but if you can read between the lines, you're already one step ahead of where writer/director Simon Rumley wishes you were -- and though I've been careful to avoid spoilers in this review, I'm sure you could make an educated guess as to what's actually going on based on this piece alone. Attentive viewers will thus find a great deal of Red, White & Blue slow going, as likely to frustrate or even annoy you as it is to entertain or challenge you.

Inattentive viewers, meanwhile, will have moved along to something more accommodating to their tastes - Saw VII for instance - well in advance of the final curtain call. So I'm not really sure who Red, White & Blue is for. If not us, and not them, then who?

Its meaning, too, proves elusive. But I'll say this for Simon Rumley's festival fave: as of the time of this writing it's been about a fortnight since I sat down to watch Red, White & Blue, and even now I'm not at all sure what to make of it. Perhaps that's the point.

Film Review | Valhalla Rising, dir. Nicholas Winding Refn

Movies are a lot like meals, if you think about it. Most will go in one end and - pardon me for saying so - out the other; these are sustenance of the basest variety. They keep you going, but the memory of them is never more than a trace, and not even that for long. However, there are also those films, and those foods, more about the art than the end result... those experiences which will remain with you for years to come, imprinted upon your memory like scars - fading with the passage of time, perhaps, but never to disappear entirely.

Valhalla Rising is an experience squarely of that latter variety, and it is powerful enough to leave a festering wound in its wake.

Shot entirely on location in Scotland - my own back yard at that! - Valhalla Rising is an elegaic chronicle of a quest for vengeance, and redemption. Danish writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn, whose oddball work on Bronson you will surely recall, bids us follow a mute warrior known only as One-Eye from a time spent in wretched captivity, through an escape aided by visions, and finally on a pilgrimage to the holy land. But when One-Eye arrives in the country his lurid dreams have heralded, he and the men who follow him - including Are, a boy slave of the same Norse chieftain who caged One-Eye for so long, and Kare, who hopes to see his dead sons again - they find not heaven, but hell.

Valhalla Rising is only loosely narrative-driven, and I dare say it is no more character-driven than that, though Mads Mikkelsen's bravura performance gives One-Eye an emotional arc of sorts. Rather, it's all about the land, and the life of the land; about a time and a place so forbidding that men and all they strive to do, and die for, are meaningless - so much miserable drizzle in the wind, which seems unceasing throughout Valhalla Rising.

Or perhaps not, for Refn's latest and surely greatest resists such pat understanding at almost every stage. What it is one moment is not at all what it is the next. It is, thus, a difficult film which demands a certain cerebral investment in order to appreciate on any level, but be sure your devotion will pay a handsome dividend when all is said and done.

Now I do not mean to suggest Valhalla Rising is devoid of action. Skulls are crushed, insides are aired out, and at least one head is detached from its traditional resting place and mounted on a pike. When the violence comes - in sudden, shattering bursts set to a spare soundtrack by PeterPeter and Peter Kyed momentarily swollen to an oppressive cacophony of churning - you will not mistake it, nor soon forget it.

Yet I cannot imagine action fans will come away from Valhalla Rising satisfied. Life for those folks One-Eye comes to blows with proves nasty, brutish and short, and the violence which inevitably results from these close encounters is not so much satisfying in itself as it is sickening. Add to that: there is no clear thread to grasp at in the intervening periods between one fight and another. As to how devotees of Refn's more visceral (and rather less artful) Pusher trilogy will react to this film, it's really anyone's guess.

And the hatchet swings both ways. Just as Valhalla Rising's transcendent tack is sure to dissuade one vast camp of viewers, so too will the occasional explosions of gruesome gore and industrial grinding offend such sensibilities as to inspire another - the arty and the farty - to prepare precious arguments about bad taste and the state of entertainment today.

Yet there will be those who can both stomach the sight of stomachs, and invest in the contemplative interim in the stirring sights and sounds of Scotland as was. Those folks - though there may only be a few of them - will come away from Valhalla Rising staggered, as I did, and single-handedly sold on anything Nicholas Winding Refn sets his sights on going forward, as I am.