Drive

I’ll get this out of the way – I’m a font geek. It’s a potentially shameful admission, but I know I’m far from alone on this. It’s such a pleasing thing to see when a good font is used well, and even more so when a bad one is used to the same effect. Which is why it came as a welcome shock when the opening titles of Drive came glaring out of the screen in neon pink Mistral – not exactly a favourite of mine, it has to be said. But for a film that has its feet firmly rooted in the 80s, both in terms of style and content, it’s a fitting choice that in a way typifies the film itself – straight out of left-field, but irrevocably drenched in familiar retro charm and violent, B-movie swagger.

Nicolas Winding Refn isn’t exactly a director known for his restraint (Bronson, Valhalla Rising), and Drive is no exception. Ryan Gosling plays the film’s nameless protagonist, a stunt driver who has a sideline in getaway driving for small-time heists, who’s world begins to unravel when his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) takes a certain shine to him – though with the imminent arrival of her husband, back home from a stretch in prison, it’s not long before things take a turn for the worst for all involved.

There’s a certain aesthetic to Drive that you will either love or hate – it’s all long, protracted pauses in conversations, glances across a room that seem to last forever, all the while Newton Thomas Sigel’s 80s-influenced synth score providing a not-so-subtle audio backdrop to proceedings. It’s like a straight-to-video crime thriller with arthouse leanings, dialogue stripped back to the bare minimum, caricature characters propelling the story to a succession of inevitably bloody conclusions. If you’re not a fan of unflinchingly graphic knife attacks and close-range shotgun blasts to the head, it could well be said this film isn’t for you. But that said, Drive is a film as simple as it is complex – it’s ambitious high art wrapped in a low art shell, shot through with a haunting, Lynchian dreamlike quality, though peppered with clichéd exchanges that at times border on the laughable. But in the same breath it lingers with you, a film that’s hard to shake even several days after you’ve left the dark of the theatre.

At times I was hoping the film would take a different turn, that it might take me in a direction I wasn’t expecting, but Winding Refn is, for all his stylistic pretensions, a director who sticks to his guns and is clearly making the films he wants to make – there’s very little evidence of studio interference in any of his films, and Drive could be his most commercially successful so far. Forget the likes of Death Proof – a film paying little more than lip service to a genre with another silk-jacketed stunt driver at its heart – Drive is the real deal, and whether you like it or not, it’s a hard film to forget.