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Just because he’s returned home to Denmark after filming for so long in California (including his first series, Too Old to Die Young, whose only season is available on Prime Video) or in Thailand, which Nicolas Winding Refn has revived with the violent realism of his debut, that of the trilogy Pusher.
Extending the trajectory of The Neon Demon Where Only God ForgivesCopenhagen Cowboy advances even further in the reduction of the story to the geometry of drives, in the distortion of time – stretched, concentrated, transforming the journey to hell of Miu (Angela Bundalovic), a young woman with the silhouette of an elf, into a hieratic ballet, hypnotically slow despite its extreme violence.
A human lucky charm (at least that’s what those who have made her a coveted commodity believe), Miu first lands in a brothel whose madam mother would, despite the biological evidence, simply want to be a mother. . Some distance from this establishment (of which Winding Refn highlights the prison nature, even a concentration camp) stands a castle, inhabited by a family of blond vampires. The prostitutes are from central or eastern Europe, the bloodthirsty monsters embody an autochthonous aristocracy, whose immemorial privilege is to bleed the populace.
Underworld Labyrinth
Between the two, an industrial pigsty where everyone disposes of the remains of their opponents. Will Miu’s powers be enough to disturb this infernal geography? Formulated in this way, the issue may seem trivial. But if Copenhagen Cowboy does not influence the stylistic orientation of Nicolas Winding Refn, one discerns in it a radical realignment of the forces present. At the center of this new order of battle, there is the figure of Miu. Angela Bundalovic, who plays her, is also a dancer. His character is almost mute, almost slender. Once she has adopted her battle dress, with a raised collar, broad shoulders, she seems to have come out of a manga box, an anime cello, with an indefinable status, between genders and ages.
Better to slip all night in this toxic bath, which generates a heavy intoxication
But there is no ambiguity in his commitment. Her perilous trajectory has been traced by women – the episodes were written by Sara Isabella Jonsson, Johanne Algren and Mona Masri – and it is always on the side of women that this superhero in the making ends up falling, that they be her companions in captivity or the owner of an Asian restaurant who serves as a cover for a trafficker. In the labyrinth of Copenhagen’s slums, the one her jailers took for a mascot turns into an exterminating angel.
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“Copenhagen Cowboy”, on Netflix: Miu, the slender superheroine of Nicolas Winding Refn