Cannes Film Festival: Drive is a film with a split personality

Target: hitman Ryan Gosling still finds time for romance with Carey Mulligan
10 April 2012

If you cast Ryan Gosling in a bloody Los Angeles thriller, you'd better have a bit of romance to assuage his many fans.

There is one in this first American film from the admired Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn.

Despite committing several murders of the most vicious variety, Gosling gazes into the eyes of Britain's Carey Mulligan like a lovelorn sheepdog.

She's a poor LA girl with a child whose partner leaves prison and looks at Gosling with suspicion.

But he's basically an honourable man and doesn't touch her.

He plays a Hollywood stunt driver moonlighting as a getaway man by night who finds himself on the run when a heist goes wrong. It's clear he's in love with the girl but the deeper he gets into trouble with the Mafia, the more violent he becomes just to save himself.

Refn, who made the brilliant Pusher series in Denmark and the equally impressive Bronson in England, is an avid fan of American thrillers and is clearly familiar with most of its clichés.

Every one is displayed, in one sequence or another, during the film.

At one point, Gosling and Mulligan are in a hotel lift with a Mafia hitman who is about to kill them. They indulge in a long and passionate kiss in front of him before Gosling bashes the hitman's head against the lift until he's dead.

It's the perfect example of a film with a split personality. Gentle romance on the one hand and vicious violence on the other. Robert Mitchum would never have accepted such a part but perhaps Gosling, mindful of the considerable European reputation of his director, decided to take the risk. The result is a film that may please and horrify his fans at the same time. But not a very convincing one to be displayed among the rarities in the Cannes competition.

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