Showing posts with label Kristin Scott Thomas. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The 10 best films of 2013 No 8 / Only God Forgives

The 10 best films of 2013

No 8

Only God Forgives

Continuing our countdown of the best movies of the past year, Peter Bradshaw celebrates a brilliant and brutal anti-revenge film

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 11 December 2013 09.40 GMT

Nicolas Winding Refn's brilliant, bizarre and ultraviolent anti-revenge movie Only God Forgives is his most interesting work since the Pusher trilogy in the Mads Mikkelsen era. It is put together with lethal strangeness: there are bad-dream setpieces of sentimentality and nauseous black comedy. The film takes place in a universe of fear, a place of deepsea-unreality in which you need to breathe through special gills. It is a tragi-exploitation shocker, an enriched uranium-cake of pulp.

Ryan Gosling is the expatriate American gangster Julian, lying low in Bangkok and running a drug business under the cover of a Muay Thai boxing club, co-managed with his psychotic brother, Billy. Billy's horrible fate is to involve Julian in a metaphysical duel with enigmatic local cop Chang, played with eerie poise by Vithaya Pansringarm.

Chang dispenses his own justice with a samurai sword, and Julian – paralysed with some kind of guilt or suppressed qualm of conscience – is mesmerised by the mere rumour of Chang's avenging presence. The situation is complicated by the arrival in Thailand of Julian's formidable mother, uproariously played by Kristin Scott Thomas. Her imperious demands bring a horrible new Freudian dimension to the drama.

Like Julian, like Chang, the film swims through the hostile streets, along corridors, into alleys, round corners, waiting for some terrible, nameless, violent destiny, and yet it entirely upends what you might expect from a revenge movie. This is a very brutal film, and enclosed in a kind of carapace of neon, a strange otherworld. Faces appear to glow in the artificial light, partly illuminated from within by their own madness.

Only God Forgives has something of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Noé's Enter the Void, granting access to a private hell. On its first appearance, it was excitably denounced and mocked by some critics. But with such a provocative film, some misjudgment is forgivable.

THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Portrait of the artist / Kristin Scott Thomas / The English Patient or Four Weddings

Kristin Scott Thomas

Kristin Scott Thomas, actor – portrait of the artist

The English Patient star talks about her big breakthrough, bad reviews – and why her worst performance is always screening on cable TV

Interview by Laura Barnett
Tuesday 12 March 2013 18.59 GMT

Kristin Scott Thomas

What first drew you to acting?

Wanting to be somebody else. As a child, I played dress-up with great conviction. I'd walk to the village shop wearing my mother's clothes, pretending I was somebody different.

What was your big breakthrough?

There are the obvious ones, like The English Patient or Four Weddings. But on a more personal level, it was when I played Bérénice at the Avignon festival [in 2001]. I hadn't done any theatre since drama school. God knows what the performance was like, but to be able to go out on stage independent of any machinery was incredibly powerful.

Do you suffer for your art?

Frequently – though I'm talking "suffer" in inverted commas. You do get lonely; you're torn in every direction. And if you've had a long career, like me, you're constantly being compared to others. You're either adored or criticised.

Did you have a plan B?

No, and I still don't. I would love to be able to stop – the problem is, I have no idea what I'd do. I'm just stuck.

Kristin Scott Thomas

How would you compare the French and British arts scenes?

The cinema is a much bigger industry in France – and there's not the same addiction to America, to pleasing wider audiences, that we get in Britain. French theatres are usually run by a single director, and are heavily subsidised. They have a captive audience, which can get a bit stifling.

What are you most proud of?

A full house on a Wednesday matinee.

What's the greatest threat to theatre today?

Star turns. I think I'm OK now – I'm counted as a theatre actor, rather than a cinema actor who just turns up for six weeks then buggers off. I was very nervous of that when I started. With Bérénice, I signed up for an eight-month tour to all sorts of godforsaken places in France. My American agents were going crazy.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

A review of my first film, Under the Cherry Moon, said, "Kristin Scott Thomas is a better cure for insomnia than a glass of warmed milk." To be fair, he was right: I was appalling. That film's always on cable – when you're zapping channels, bored, with jet lag, you'll suddenly see me in black-and-white with a lot of makeup, being utterly unconvincing.

What work of art would you most like to own?

I'd like to have been painted by the artist Meredith Frampton in the 1930s. His subjects are very smooth and doll-like, with a disturbing, burning energy.

Is there anything about your career you regret?

Lots of things – but it would be cruel to mention names. It's a job; sometimes I have to do things I don't want to do. But I've discovered that if you stop, everything churns on without you. So you have to keep pedalling, really.

In short

Born: Redruth, 1960.

Career: Films include The English Patient, Four Weddings and a Funeral and I've Loved You So Long. Stage includes several major roles in French productions, and at the Royal Court and London's West End. Performs in Old Times at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1, until 6 April.

High point: "Doing the camera test for The English Patient. I felt that playing that part was going to be so important for me – and it was."

Low point: "Every time I make a film and think, 'What on earth am I doing?'"

THE GUARDIAN