Bronson

[pro-bassoonist]

French distribs Wild Side are set to release Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008) on December. The film is currently available on BD in the United Kingdom. Winner of the Official Competition Award (Best Film) at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009.

Official French site:
http://www.bronson-lefilm.com/

Screen International:

With Bronson, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (the Pusher trilogy) takes his first director-for-hire job and makes an indelible stamp on it. Bronson is about the UK’s most violent prisoner, Charles Bronson, born Michael Peterson, but it’s in no way a biography. This is Refn’s nihilistic tribute to Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange; a hyper-violent showcase with strong theatrical elements scored elliptically to classical music and classic pop tunes. It is propelled by a muscular - literally - performance from an almost-unrecognisable Tom Hardy, compellingly if repellently watchable in the title role.

Commercially, this will live at the fringes: a violent, often funny cabaret which doesn’t really aim to illuminate, it will find buyers but will have a tough trek out of hard-core art house internationally due to its subject matter. Refn’s framing can’t help but attract: he presents Bronson as a jester on the stage, a showman, a face-painted, elaborately-moustachioed philosopher whose ambition was only ever to be famous. That, coupled with Hardy’s show-stopping performance, will draw select audiences to the film. Ratings could be an issue. While Bronson contains no elements of sexual violence, there is always a possibility that it will court controversy in the UK, where Bronson is tabloid fodder, and be adopted by the same right-wing elements that embraced A Clockwork Orange.

Jailed in 1974, when he was 19, for a robbery, Bronson’s prison term has been repeatedly extended due to attacks on prison staff and hostage-taking situations, not to mention his famous rooftop protests, and he has only spent four-odd months out of prison in last 34 years, 30 of them spent in solitary confinement. Physically, he maintains a regimen which keeps him in a shape similar to Hardy’s, and he currently writes poetry and paints. Refn presents him as a man who found his natural habitat behind prison bars; whose bare-knuckle violence and animalistic physicality resulted in the fame he had long sought.

Refn tells the story episodically, with a loose narrative timeline, interspersed with Bronson as a MC on stage. Visually, Bronson is a stagy, theatrical, claustrophobic affair, set inside darkened, spotlit prison cells with memorable spashes of colour and an intense focus on Hardy’s face.

Pro-B