DON'T MISTAKE BRONSON, THE latest study in violence from Danish wunderkind Nicholas Winding Refn (the Pusher trilogy), for a biopic of the late Death Wish star, Charles Bronson. The Charles Bronson at the centre of this bizarre biopic is actually Mic
key Peterson, Britain's most violent prisoner. Winding Refn transforms his story into a deranged, thoroughly engaging piece of performance art, so that it almost doesn't matter that Bronson is a real person. It's what he represents in cultural terms that this film is exploring.
Taking us on a twisted trip through his psyche, the film uses Peterson to explore the allure and thrill of violence for those of us who experience it voyeuristically, one step removed from any danger. Framing his story as an audacious vaudeville act, it frequently presents Bronson (played by Tom Hardy) on a stage where this intensely charismatic, self-aware anti-hero can capitalise on his gift for wry humour to play an appreciative theatre crowd like a fiddle. These scenes are used to prime us for sequences of horrifying brutality as Bronson repeatedly fights, bites and battles his way towards extending his sentence far beyond his original conviction (seven years as a 19-year-old for armed robbery). This is a man who seems to have found his natural habitat in the clink, an observation Refn emphasises with scenes that detail, in comically absurd ways, his brief stretches in the outside world. Stylistic nods to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Lyndsay Anderson's If… and O Lucky Man! abound and Hardy's central performance is truly mesmerising, presenting an astonishing portrait of a man so comfortable with his own atavistic impulses he'll do whatever it takes to preserve them. Bold, bonkers, brilliant film-making.
Such qualities have been central to the appeal of David Lynch's films for more than three decades now, but his last film, Inland Empire, proved a wig-out too far for most and, as the newish documentary Lynch (it emerged on the festival circuit in 2007 but has only just made it to DVD) takes us behind the scenes of the mostly improvised project, it soon becomes clear why. "I'm so depressed," confesses the endearingly loveable weirdo between takes. "I don't know what I'm doing at all." Elsewhere, Lynch expounds on his transcendentalist approach to art and creativity, insisting enjoyment derives from "the doing" of the work, not the end result, which may be why watching the brilliant Lynch creating Inland Empire is infinitely more fascinating than anything in the finished film.
Lynch's daughter, Jennifer, is also a filmmaker of some notoriety, thanks to her 1993 debut, Boxing Helena, the reception of which was so (deservedly) disastrous, she's only just got round making her second film. Alas, Surveillance sees her refusing to step out from her father's shadow, taking what could have been a straight-up slasher film and transforming it into a freak-fest that wouldn't look out of place on a double-bill with Lynch Snr's Lost Highway. Unfortunately, that's not the selling point it should be. Surveillance may trade in strangeness, but it telegraphs its twist ending to such a degree that when it is finally revealed, it's more likely to leave you shaking your head than scratching it.
