There’s No Business Like Slow Business
Although it’s been served up since June on Amazon Prime in ten installments, Nicolas Winding Refn emphatically declared his—let’s call it “project” rather than “series” for the moment—Too Old to Die Young “not TV,” but rather a “13-hour movie” at this year’s Cannes, where he presented two episodes, pointedly snatched from the middle of the show’s chronology to mirror today’s aleatory online viewing habits. (Does the latter make Winding Refn’s epic also an act of defiance against the medium’s normal linear progression? Certainly, with its character arcs converging at near-interminable rates, it often feels as if it could be watched at random—a method its director has also endorsed, all contradictions be damned.) But I guess Winding Refn’s own definition of his work is fair enough, given that Too Old to Die Young takes his development as a filmmaker towards dilation—or deflation, some might argue—and his abstraction to ever bolder extremes.
Last time around, at a mere two hours, the slow-burn stylization of his craftily designed cannibal-supermodel horror show (2016) had suggested a perverted pre-Code fantasy, or a particularly brain-melting episode from the original meticulously drawn, quartered, and laboriously qualified as the most unforgiving application yet of Winding Refn’s latter-day predilection for affectless acting, whose Brechtian effect has little to do with Bressonian humanism or Straubian materialism, but rather an idea of chic, poker-faced intensity as cineastic epiphany—something that plagues the work of many a Kubrick acolyte.
