Neflix, the increasingly maligned audiovisual platform, offers us, just one day before the start of the year, one of the best series in its entire catalogue, and I can say, without fear of being wrong, the best series of this 2023: Copenhagen Cowboy.
Nicolas Winding Refn He has returned with a new work of art under his arm. The Scandinavian genius seems to have taken a liking to this series. After the wonderful and underappreciated series of him, too old to die youngwhen we all thought that he would return to the cinema, he surprises us with Copenhagen Cowboy created together with Sara Isabella Jønsson Veddea new series with which to delve even deeper is his personal world.
His new series for Netflix is one of those audiovisual gems that rarely appear. A work of beauty, personality and originality, which can only arise from the brilliant and unique look of an author like Nicolas Winding Refn. An architect of the image. A painter of the 21st century.
Copenhagen Cowboy: the best Netflix series
The new NWR series tells the story of Miu, a “Tomboy” with an enigmatic and magnetic presence played by the muse Angela Bundalovic. Through Miu we will move around those sordid worlds that Refn portrays so well. We will get to know the dirty laundry of the Albanian, Chinese, Russian, or even other lineages mafia…
Miu is an entity above good and evil, a lucky coin, someone capable of the best and the worst. The personification of fortune, the miracle and the fateful. Miu is the cowboy from Copenhagen.
But in the series we will only meet Miu, also dark characters devoted to trickery, characters with a broken heart, psychopaths, scholars of the symbology surrounding the penis, rude gangsters with the soul of singers or lawyers who live in fear of to lose what they obtained by divine grace, or extraterrestrial…
In Copenhagen Cowboy the dream is mixed with the real, fantasy with the cruelest vital harshness. Different dimensional planes coexist to shape the world of Nicolas Winding Refn. A world so rich that it needs many more planes of reality than ours to be able to be counted.
If at the beginning of his career Nicolas Winding Refn surprised us all with his dirty, brutal and hyper-realistic cinema of works like the trilogy pusher either Bleeder, in Copenhagen Cowboycontinues to develop that path that arose between Valhalla Rising Y bronson and was formalized in Drive. A much more precious cinema that continued to maintain its violence, but a world in which the harshest reality coexisted with unreality. Where the main characters seemed to be rewarded by a divine gift.
In the cinema that came after Drive, further delved into that idea. She styled up. synthesized. Until I get to this Copenhagen Cowboyin which, from its first scene, NWR gives us a tour of the origin of his career until today.
Angela Bundalovic as Miu, the Cowboy from Copenhagen
Copenhagen Cowboy It has a good assortment of charismatic and particular characters, but none of them shadows Miu, the absolute protagonist of the series. Is she a girl with powers? An alien? An angel? Does matters, It’s all that and much more. As I said before, it is an entity. It is a presence with the ability to modify the lives of the rest of the characters in the series and each of the planes in which it appears.
Angela Bundalovic is the actress who embodies her. An actress with a huge stage presence. With a look that can freeze you or bring to light all your deepest secrets. The image of him leaves no one indifferent.
Angela Bundalovic is a Danish actress and dancer that fans of the Nordic Netflix series will know, the rain, in which she played Beatrice. Later we could see her playing Nadja, one of the protagonists of the Scandinavian series limboland.
It will be released in theaters this year. Copenhagen does not existthe latest film by Martin Skovbjerg Jensen.
In Copenhagen Cowboy, Bundalovic does some very interesting bodywork. His movements are very slow and precise, as are his looks. His pace is leisurely and relaxed. His voice work is also very remarkable. How difficult it is to feel that you don’t feel. How difficult it is to be without being.
When Miu fights, Bundalovic demonstrates skill when it comes to performing the different martial arts choreographies that her character has in the series. But, here Angela Bundalovic, with more training, I could have gotten even more organic and fast choreographies.
An artist named Nicolas Windingn Refn
if in Only God forgives, Neon Demon or the series Too old to die young photography exploits the light offered by neonsin the series Copenhagen Cowboy, NWR continues to experiment with the possibilities offered by this type of light. The result? Spectacular.
At all times you are enjoying a true work of art in motion. His framing and composition are pure NWR. The director has generated a brand. His style is so his that it is unmistakable. His dilated pans, his zoom in Y zoom out or movements in 360º of the camera are a sign 100% NWR. It is marvelous to enjoy how he plans and lights those planes that, on numerous occasions, combine different spaces in which the action takes place.
This time the photography is in charge of Magnus Nordenhof Jøncka professional who has perfectly entered the world imagined by Nicolas Winding Refn.
In music he recounts with Cliff Martinezthis time surrounded by other musicians like Peter Kyed, Peter Peter and Julian Winding.
As in all his work, the art and production design is magnificent. One of the fundamental pieces of his universe, just like his wardrobe. Who doesn’t want to buy Miu’s tracksuit? Do you remember Ryan Gosling’s jacket and gloves in Drive?
Copenhagen Cowboy: a story with unforgettable moments of sorority
To tell the story of Copenhagen Cowboy an exciting team of female writers/directors has been assembled. Together with Nicolas Winding Refn, we find the co-creator of the series, Sara Isabella Jønsson Veddescreenwriter of the 2021 films, Miss Osaka Y Persona non grata; Johanne Algren was the screenwriter of holidays (2018) or the series Kamikaze (2021) and Mona Masri wrote the scripts for Amine (2022) and those of some episodes of the series Easy money (2021).
Between the four of them, they tell us a story in the form of a fantastic thriller in which, around the protagonist and heroine of the story, we find important female characters. Women who are neither good nor bad, are the result of a life that has not made it easy for them. Victims of a patriarchal society that has allowed them to exist, in many cases, in the shadow of evil. In the shadow of power in the shadow of man.
Miu ends up appearing in the lives of these women. On some occasions he does it to punish them, on others to defend them, so that justice is done, to confront them with a world of men in which something more than luck is needed to escape unscathed from contact with evil. Miu, like the Greek Furies from whom we borrow the name, uses all her abilities to eradicate male evil, either with violence or by making them lose their sanity.. She is the revenge tool of characters like Cimona (Valentina Dejanovic) or Mother Hulda (li ii zhang).
Copenhagen Cowboy: Hideo Kojima, Mads Brügger or Nicolas Winding Refn himself, appear in the new Netflix series
It’s fun to see how Nicolas Winding Refn gathers friends and offers characters to the actor Zlatko Buric (unforgettable in pusher III and winner of the Best Actor Award at the 2022 European Film Awards for his character in The triangle of sadness), video game designer, Hideo Kojima(Metal Gear Solid), or directors like mads brugger (The Mole: Undercover in North Korea). Precisely in the scene in which this director appears, he reserves for himself, a small character as an observer. A character more anecdotal than useful for the story. A fun wink.
Definitely, if you want to enjoy the best Serie from Netflix, do not hesitate and get hooked on Copenhagen Cowboy, a unique and fascinating series that will blow your mind. Its end promises a second season, but seeing the Netflix cancellation trend and which are the most watched series and movies on the platform, I imagine that being able to see a second season of Copenhagen Cowboyit will be something as miraculous, as Netflix has produced the new madness of Nicolas Winding Refn.
Furious greetings.