Film
Bristol Film Festival: Bronson
- Director
- Nicolas Winding Refn
- Certificate
- 18
- Running Time
- 92 mins
The modern fashion in biopics is to serve up a lot of cheap, mechanistic and unconvincing psychoanalysis. You know the sort of thing: I wasn’t allowed to have a pet gerbil, so I grew up to become a serial killer, and so on. Refreshingly, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t bother with any of that nonsense in his skewed, stylised biopic, which is more concerned with depicting the former Michael Peterson’s transformation to become the nation’s most famous inmate, Charles Bronson, as some kind of bizarre conceptual/performance art project. If that sounds rather wanky, be reassured that the result is thoroughly entertaining, and often very funny, with a hypnotic and revelatory central performance by a bulked-up Tom Hardy, playing like a cross between Chopper and A Clockwork Orange.
As a nipper, Michael finds he’s rather good at hitting people very hard indeed – other kids, teachers, etc. This, combined with a desire to be famous, sets the pattern for his adult life. Busted for armed robbery in 1974 at the age of 19 (he gets away with £26), he’s sentenced to seven years in the clink, but actually serves 34. The Bronson moniker is adopted at the suggestion of his effete manager (Matt King) during a brief, troubled spell on the outside when he attempts to earn a crust as a bare-knuckle fighter. Today, he remains a Category A prisoner in solitary confinement as a result of his continuous feral behaviour behind bars, where he’s fomented riots and taken hostages on a regular basis.
Hardy’s Bronson not only narrates in voiceover but also delivers a music hall-style performance in clown make-up, regaling a hushed audience with anecdotes, while Refn signals his unconventional intentions with an eccentric soundtrack selection ranging from Verdi and Wagner to the Pet Shop Boys.
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There’s a curious undercurrent of homoeroticism throughout, though Bronson himself is never depicted as being anything other than straight, despite that seriously camp moustache. The film doesn’t shy away from depicting this unpredictable, war-painted fitness enthusiast and latter-day artist as a terrifying sociopathic figure but also makes some telling points about the politics of his situation and the decision to declare him sane after he caused such disruption at Rampton and Broadmoor (“I love fuckin’ nutters, but…they’re fuckin’ nutters!”), eventually concluding that he has effectively become a prisoner of his own myth.
This Bristol Film Festival screening is part of a series of suitably crime’n’punishment-related features screened in the former cells below the Bridewell Police Station – aka The Island. Go here for tickets.
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