Charlie Bronson, Britain’s most violent prisoner and the antihero of Nicolas Winding Refn’s tour de force, is a man with a calling. He just needed jail time to find it. In 1974, Charlie robs a post office and draws a seven-year sentence. But stone walls do not a prison make. His “hotel room” becomes an incubator for his art, which is violence. Taking a perverse glee in fighting, he’s sent to a mental institution, where, drugged and drooling, he still musters defiance. Bronson had it's premier at the London Film Fest and is now going to be playing at Sundance, and we reported earlier on the teaser, but now theirs a sweet, full length trailer. It's being called "A clockwork Orange for the 21st Century", that's a pretty heavy quote, you better live up to it! The film has officially been announced as part of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It has been awhile since I saw anything that really blew my mind, and this week we've already got three indie films making our front page.
In 1974, a misguided 19 year old named Michael Peterson decided he wanted to make a name for himself and so, with a homemade sawn-off shotgun and a head full of dreams he attempted to rob a post office. Swiftly apprehended and originally sentenced to 7 years in jail, Peterson has subsequently been behind bars for 34 years, 30 of which have been spent in solitary confinement.His eventual release is short lived, and he returns to jail. Placed in an art class, Charlie creates his masterpiece. It is not a painting.
Though based on a real person, Bronson is less a biopic than a virtuosic explosion of style. With twisted imagery, the music of Wagner and Pet Shop Boys, and a stunning performance by Tom Hardy, Refn creates an aesthetic that is both complicit in Charlie’s violence but also theatrical. Charlie narrates his own story before an audience, and the movie is just an extension of this burlesque staging. Our moral compass reeling, we’re tempted to see him as an animal, but violence is simply the fullest expression of his identity. Overjoyed by his fame and ever-increasing capacity for harm, Charlie walks the cellblock beaming with pride. He has become somebody. He is—quite terrifyingly—the hero of his own story.
Movie trailer after the interval-
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