Bronson

dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (2009) UK

“You’re a very sweet man, Charlie,” says Irene (Kelly Adams), “but you’ve got no ambition.” It’s hard to know whether you agree or disagree, for Charlie (Tom Hardy) may be blessed with a roguish grin and a charismatic naïveté, but he’s also Britain’s most violent prisoner, a pugnacious powder keg of a con who seizes any opportunity to brawl with the screws. As for ambition, he has that in spades, but it’s ambition of a kind that, in keeping with these celebrity-obsessed times, never seems to get beyond merely wanting to be famous. Charlie finds the path to this calling in prison, where his aggression soon wins him the recognition he’s been craving.

Like Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Bronson is a study in intransigence, the story of a man deliberately pitting himself against society. There have been many films about the prison experience, but Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director most famous for his Pusher trilogy about macho posturing in Copenhagen’s violent, multi-ethnic underworld, and himself something of a rebel, is the first to examine its incarcerated subject not as a monster or a victim, but rather as an artist – and one who truly suffers for his art, whether through regular beatings or long stints in solitary.

The story unfolds in a succession of discrete episodes. It begins with Bronson’s childhood (beating up class bullies, assaulting a teacher), continues through his endless bloody encounters with prison staff (all brought on by himself), a period of heavy sedation in Rampton (reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange), a stint as a bare-knuckle boxer and a final, defiant demonstration of recalcitrance in the prison art studio.

With his shaven head and walrus moustache, Bronson looks like a company sergeant major or a circus strongman, his voice shifts between a parade-ground bark and the flat monotone of Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty. Given a highly stylised look by cinematographer Larry Smith, the film’s episodic narrative is punctuated by Bronson, the great exhibitionist, giving a performance before a black-tie audience in the theatre of his mind. In this way, ever mindful of his image and its management, Charlie is allowed to fashion his own story, either in raw addresses to camera, or in full clown’s make-up before the applauding, tuxedoed masses. That this fractured narration of events, with all its camp bit-players and surreal flourishes, is itself cast as just another piece of showmanship merely underlines the elusiveness of the ‘real’ Charlie Bronson, a man masked by an actor’s name, played by yet another actor.

The self-created, pseudo-comic Bronson of the film is an artist without an art, a provincial nobody trying to recreate himself as a major somebody. It becomes increasingly clear, however, that the ‘performance’ itself is what constitutes the man, and that our attention is all that is needed to sustain him. Without that, Charlie is just another battered and bruised figure alone in a cage. Yet, he contains within himself something that we have to recognise in ourselves. He’s an unaccommodated and unaccommodating man, happier in a claustrophobic world of prison bars, crashing doors, cages and straitjackets than enjoying the supposed lack of restrictions in normal civilised life.

Dressed as an insistent antihero in the otherworldly trappings of Kubrick and Lynch, Bronson is a prison flick that refuses to confine itself to genre cliché. Refn, unafraid of toying with audience expectations, shows a healthy disinterest in biopic conventions, bringing to the project a sharp, surreal, foreign eye. It’s an artful blend of hardman viciousness and bizarre camp that, although viewers will certainly feel the full force of its impact, they will also, like incendiary eponym’s bewildered wardens, never be quite sure what has hit them. Still, in a film that’s closer to Blue Velvet than Chopper, jailhouse ultra-violence and arthouse oddity certainly make for an arresting mix. Irredeemable thug or unconventional performance artist, Bronson is hard-hitting either way.

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