Tribeca 2011: NEON FLESH (CARNE DE NEON) Review

Contributing Writer; Toronto, Canada (@triflic)
Tribeca 2011: NEON FLESH (CARNE DE NEON) Review

Ricky is having a tough day, the bullet with his name on it is quite literally staring him in the face.  Structured as a flashback of his life right at the second of final judgment, for (ostensibly) our entertainment, the writer of cult festival hit Sexykiller, Paco Cabezas, blows up his award winning short into a lengthy feature of the same name:  Neon Flesh.  In the world of Carne de Neón you are either climbing the rungs of the sex business (It's hard out there for a wannabe pimp) or being gobbled up by it.  There are cops and John's to make life difficult or lucrative, but it is the spectacularly screwed-up street folks that are on display here either for a stab at gangster coolness or goofy sight gags.  Let us get this out of the way, I will probably not see a worse or more disappointing film in 2010 than Carne de Neón.  A film that plays offbeat caricatures of Alzheimer patients, mental halfwits, transvestites and pimps for laughs with the high sheen and cinematographic gloss of a cheeky heist flick.  Just the heist elements are disenfranchised prostitutes.   It slaps together one of those plots that features several 'wacky' misunderstandings and a host of characters that bang into one another in unlikely ways but the actual situations are so vulgar and ill considered - pregnant whores for giggles?  No Thanks.  I was left feeling pretty dirty after the whole affair that being perfectly frank doesn't add up to much more than noise and vinegar.  The tone and style has had comparisons to Guy Ritchie's early filmmaking, particularly Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, and I can see where that type of comparison comes from, but it is misleading.  More that Carne de Neón is aiming to be in the same cinematic territory of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, the desires and troubles of a collection of on the fringe folks who get in more trouble than they bargained for.  But as a worthwhile piece of cinema, the comparison ends there.  Actually,  for the record, Carne de Neón makes Revolver, perhaps Ritchie's worst received crime film, look like Goodfellas by comparison.  

Either Cabezas is playing the most subversive satirical trick ever, (Lars Von Trier could never be this subtle) or someone was fooled to think that this story told this way is interesting or funny or cool.   Ricky, a born on the streets, raised on the streets hustler opens a whore-house as a tribute to his mother, a business the both of the could be proud of, well after she gets out of prison.  With his 'savings' he goes about gathering up whores to work there like so much chattel, and it is placed both serious and for laughs.  When one of his newly hired ladies gets pregnant and it is casually discussed that they could make about 50K by simply taking the child and selling it.  Or how about the bon mot of providing a specific customer the chance to rape a police officer's daughter?  When Ricky picks his mother up as she gets out of prison, she offers to give him a blow-job to get some extra cash.  You see his mother has Alzheimer's Disease, and it is played for such an unbearably failed gag that  I am sure some activist group will take the film to task.  But really some of these moments are beside the point when you consider that our protagonist, the man who is attempting (as per usual in the genre) to be the 16 year old boy wish-fulfillment of cool is so insensitive and indifferent with his women that is damn near the worst of the bunch.  Sure, Ricky is caught up in the problems of setting up a business in the criminal underworld that wants no competition and has no Better Business Bureau and he is thus provided with an established competitor who is made so much worse so as to make Ricky not look like a complete misogynist ape.  Personally, I do not need a likable protagonist to enjoy a film either, although one might argue in mainstream commercial cinema - the space that Carne De Neon is very clearly trying to occupy,  it is probably a wise idea. but Ricky is so unrepentant and righteously misguided that the sympathy the film seems to require of its audience is damn near impossible.  

The only way they could have made this worse was to put a few characters in black-face and be done with have a big goofy minstrel-show climax.  The moral compass of Carne de Neón is misguided it is completely annihilated.  Take what Nicholas Winding Refn did with The Pusher Trilogy or Bleeder, slap on a $1000 dollar suit, lot of lipstick, a clown nose, and give either of them a full frontal lobotomy the result is Carne de Neón.  It wants to be a slicker more commercial A Clockwork Orange at times (you will not miss the direct nod in the middle of the film), but whoa daddy, just because you watched Stanley Kubrick's film it does not mean you understood it.   My only fear that going off on a bit of a rant on this movie will make people curious enough to see it.  Better rent the latest Rob Schneider comedy, at least in that case you will be spared all of the writer/directorial posturing.   Add that nothing makes a lick of sense even by 'movie-logic' standards.  There is a mix-up of sorts that results in a castration, a 'sex doll mask' robbery and various other 'big moments' including the rival pimp and his mad quest to get revenge on all cops for murdering his son that are sort-of, kind-of connected in an attempt to be clever.  The structure of all these mis-communications is apropos if only because the director seems to be trying to get across to the audience that all of this bullshit is worth your entertainment dollar.  It is a real shame too, because many of the supporting actors (Balada Triste's Happy Clown, Antonio de la Torre, Sexy Killer's Macarena Gómez and one of the prolific stars of Spanish Cinema, Ángela Molina are great, there is no phoning anything in here.  The cinematography is certainly award-worthy in glamourizing this particular world (when it is not leering at neon-lit flesh.)

I am not easily offended, I can defend films of questionable content, Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy,  Rémy Belvaux & André Bonzel's Man Bites Dog and Koen Mortier's Ex-Drummer, and comedy-violence cocktails like Herzog's Bad Lieutenant or the many works of Alex de le Iglasia on the grounds that they have something to say amongst the stylization and bombast.  I suppose those films wear their satire on their sleeve a little better.  Heck, I dug the directors previous writing in Sexykiller, for its bold and zesty send up of a serial killing Barbie-Girl type on a college campus.  Other than that a son will do anything, however misguided, to win the and recognition of his mother, including ruining the lives of a large number other people, I do not believe that there is much of a satirical element to Carne de Neón.  It is too busy making every scene and every situation look 'cool' and the filmmaker 'edgy.'  The final scene plays like truimph and not tragedy, and it would take strong convincing that this is Paul Verhoeven styled irony.  Perhaps the wide and sudden tonal shifts should be left to the Koreans, maybe Park Chan Wook or Bong Joon Ho could do something with the plight of a newborn in the world of gangsters doing gangster things and make it mean something.  All the things that The Boondock Saints is consistently taken to task for are even more egregiously on display in Carne de Neón.  It is misogynistic enough to leer at the strippers, even as it treats their problems and hang-ups as wacky plot contrivances.  In short, Carne de Neón is a sitcom of pornography, and not a good one.  Micheal Haneke made Funny Games to critique a certain type of watching violence and nudity for pleasure, but I have never encountered a film more precisely in its appropriateness of Haneke's ire than this film.  Neither message movie or crime farce, it just lies there flopping like a fish out of water for a completely unjustified nearly two hour runtime.  Do not think it is cool, just take pity on the poor thing for the ill conceived poseur bullshit that it is.

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