"Her Private Hell" (Her Private Hell, 18+), the first feature film in a decade from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, has opened in Russian cinemas after a rough reception at the 73rd Cannes Film Festival. Critics reportedly found Refn's familiar visual excess irritating rather than impressive this time, faulting the film for pretentiousness and for lacking the confessional depth many had expected from his long-awaited return.
Refn, known for the neon-lit visual style of films such as "Drive" and "The Neon Demon," spent part of his ten years away from feature filmmaking on a 25-minute work described as a brief look into "the kingdom of the dead." With "Her Private Hell" now in Russian theatres, local audiences have the chance to weigh the Cannes verdict for themselves.
Refn's plots have always been loose scaffolding: describing the bare bones of the story gives little sense of what it is actually like to watch one of his films, since the effect comes mainly from the visual style layered on top. Even so, the basic structure of this one can be outlined.
A cyberpunk city in pink smog
The heroine, El, whose name can be read as the French word for "she" or as a nod to Refn's past muse Elle Fanning, arrives in a cyberpunk-style megacity wrapped in endless pink smog, a visual echo of the comic "Pink Cotton," which is being adapted for the screen within the story. She checks into a futuristic hotel alongside an up-and-coming actress named Hunter (Kristen Froseth) and her stepmother Dominic (Havana Rose Liu), who is close to her in age. They are joined by El's father, director Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), whom all his young proteges adore, except El herself, his real daughter, who hides her feelings behind sulky expressions.
The legend of the leather man
Gathering "his girls," Johnny tells them a frightening legend about a leather man, possibly an infernal creature, possibly a man of flesh and blood, who once lost his beloved daughter. Whenever fog settles over the city, the story goes, he searches for her among the faces of sorrowful young women. Each time he fails to find his own child, he tears open the chest of the woman he mistook for her. The only way to survive him, according to the legend, is to cut off his leather-gloved hands.
A parallel storyline follows a character named Kay, played by Charles Melton, somewhere in a Japanese quarter of the city, or perhaps in an entirely different place, searching for his own missing daughter and relying on nothing but his fists.
Andersen's shadow and a different score
The film leans heavily on a fairy-tale narrative, with symbols scattered through it like breadcrumbs, an approach that has satisfied some viewers who enjoyed piecing them together and struck others as overblown directorial flourish. Among the clearest references is Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl," a story by Refn's fellow Dane, whose moral and imagery, particularly fire and matches, resurface throughout the film.
The music underlines that sentimental note. Rather than his usual composer Cliff Martinez or the synthesizer sound of the late DJ Kavinsky, Refn turned to veteran Italian composer Pino Donaggio, known for scoring Brian De Palma's "Carrie" and "Dressed to Kill." Donaggio's delicate, old-fashioned melodies accompany both the actresses in their doll-house skyscraper and Kay through his bloody confrontations with the yakuza.
Repetition, and a reading between the lines
Some of the criticism is fair, given how heavily the film leans on Refn's familiar themes and devices: the pairing of femininity and masculinity, Japanese motifs, echoes of his own "The Neon Demon," stylized violence and Freudian imagery all return once again.
Critics hoping for a grand confession from a director returning from the brink appear to have mistaken the film's childlike quality for weakness, overlooking what could be read as a tentative fatherly gesture: an apology, or a justification, addressed to Refn's own daughters, Lola and Liz, who may share something of the heroine's turmoil, even if not to the same degree. "Her Private Hell," on that reading, is the ache of waiting for a love someone else cannot give, an attachment to a past that drags a person under, overwhelming anger and self-pity, and finally the feeling of being a hunted horse in an arena you built yourself.
