Copenhagen Cowboy review: Nicolas Winding Refn’s visually striking series lacks signature magic

Language: Danish with Hindi and English options Cast: Angela Bundalovic, Fleur Frilund, Lola Corfixen, Zlatko Buric, Andreas Lykke Jorgensen as Nicklas, Li Ii Zhang, Dragana Milutinovic Created by: Nicolas Winding Refn Nicolas Winding Refn’s new series would strike as familiar fare to regular fans, visually and in terms of themes used to set up the storyline. The Danish filmmaker, who prefers to brand himself NWR lately, transports viewers into the criminal netherworld of Copenhagen through a young woman’s tale of revenge. The neo-noir drama plays out a dark storyline with its creator’s signature psychedelic flair intact, and at the same retains the maverick craftsman’s fine cinematic aesthetics. The trademark neon-lit vibrancy set aside, Winding Refn tends to bank on atmospherics to sustain a show that hardly delivers the gripping story you’d expect and is weighed down by its languid pace. The relaxed approach was perhaps meant to suit the episodic format of storytelling and unfold the plot gradually. Copenhagen Cowboy uses its six episodes, with runtime ranging from 47 to 56 minutes, to narrate a crime drama that could perhaps have been wrapped up in about half that duration. While the unhurried narration occasionally lets the filmmaker and his team of co-writers to dwell on nuances, the treatment overall gets in the way of setting up an absorbing narrative and tends to test audience patience. The outcome is a show that partially satisfies with its recognisable vibes that mix the sordid with the spectacular. Winding Refn stuffs his screenplay with Serbian gangsters, Korean mob bosses, streetside African drug pushers and international white-collar transgressors to draw up a picture of Copenhagen’s underworld, adding a twist of supernatural drama with an allusion to “spirits and souls”. Since his debut film Pusher in 1996, and via cinematic gems such as Bleeder, Bronson, Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, the filmmaker has regularly revealed an obsession to identify violence as an intrinsic human emotion, realising its consequence through his patented tales of crime and/or revenge. When he forayed the streaming zone with his 2019 series Too Old To Die Young, you’d have expected Winding Refn to go beyond standard tropes, but the filmmaker showed no intent to let go of his fetish for dark themes served with a punkish edge. He goes for a repeat of the creative treatment in his latest, too. Returning to the Danish underworld for the first time since Pusher III (2005), Winding Refn sets up his narrative around a young woman named Miu ( Angela Bundalovic ), who is sold as a “lucky charm” in the criminal world. Essentially, the screenplay unfolds through Miu’s journey in the underworld, from one crime boss to the next one. An aging sex trade matriarch keeps her hoping Miu will help her get pregnant while a drug runner wants her magic to boost business. The storyline lays bare the labyrinths of Copenhagen’s gangland, promising a bestseller-level thriller. As she is sucked into the lairs of organised crime, Miu’s story takes a metaphysical turn that seemingly leads up to a supernatural domain. The idea intrigues, on paper at least, promising bestseller stuff about a mysterious girl in a sombre milieu that’s laden with a hint of the uncanny. We understand as the series ends that Miu is not normal, and that all the talk about her supernatural powers might just have been true. As a key character tells her: “I don’t care who you are or what you are capable of, but people around you end up dying.” If Winding Refn’s bid to set up a USP lay in creating suspense around the characterisation of Miu, he has deliberately kept the protagonist vague in disposition. The strategy works in the initial portions. She comes across as a silent type, rarely speaking but conveying a lot through her eyes to the extent that the odd prop character asks Miu to leave the room because she finds her gaze “unsettling”. Angela Bundalovic plays Miu adequately, maintaining a curiosity quotient about her role all along. She must have had less than three pages of dialogues across six episodes and banks on expressive eyes and body language to stir up an impact. Winding Refn draws from retro fashion while imagining Miu — her look comprises a close-crop hairdo and a Superman blue jacket worn with matching tracksuit. Bundalovic’s act is perhaps the sole aspect why the show might resonate in your mind long after you have watched it. Yet, even star of the show seems to increasingly fade in impact after a point, if only because the slowness in storytelling eclipses everything else. It is almost as if, after over two and a half decades of consistently building up a cult following, Winding Refn knows his fans are game to patiently sit through and wait for the explanatory punchline scene right at the end of final episode. In a bid to give the revenge thriller a deeper context, the filmmaker and his team of co-writers (Sara Isabella, Jonsson Vedde, Johanne Algren and Mona Masri) try packing in questions about morality, deliberating on the timeless battle between good and evil. The team of writers would perhaps have done better to focus only on old fashion suspense kitsch. Winding Refn’s effort to balance an allegorical subtext with the slow burn attempt at mystery drama suffers also because the overall plot largely comprises episodes that don’t quite come together to form a cohesive whole. Although the filmmaker maintains narrative and visual tones that are instantly identifiable with his overall body of work, Winding Refn’s latest is notably lower on violence, particularly gory sequences, compared to highlight brutal fare such as Pusher, Bronson, Drive and Only God Forgives. This isn’t Winding Refn at his energetic best, and one hopes the uninspiring bits about his latest are mere teething woes of a filmmaker aiming to move to the next level in his career. The final episode not surprisingly signs off with an open ending. We see how Miu has made enough powerful foes through her actions for the makers to tease the audience with a hint there’s more coming. Hopefully, Copenhagen Cowboy’s next ride into the streaming space will be a far more engrossing experience. Rating: * * & 1/2 (two and a half stars out of five)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram