Cannes Film Festival: Miike\'s Honest Cop, Winding Refn\'s Wallpaper

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images Takashi Miike in Cannes, where his “Shield of Straw” is in competition.

CANNES, France - The laughter started again when the soulful thug adrift in “Only God Forgives” slid a hand in his dead mother's eviscerated belly, seemingly going for her womb. The mother, played by Kristin Scott Thomas with long, bleached-blond hair and her usual hauteur, has come to Bangkok because the eldest rancid fruit of said womb, Billy, has been murdered. Mom demands that her youngest, Julian (Ryan Gosling), do something. It's complicated, he says â€" but alas, it really isn't, despite the nods to Macbeth or Hamlet, Michael Mann or William Friedkin and whatever â€" explaining that Billy raped and killed a 16-year-old girl. “I'm sure,” Mom replies, “he must have had his reasons.”

That line prompted the nasty laughs it was surely meant to. Yet it seems unlikely that the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn intended to inspire all the derisive titters, hoots, groans, noisy walkouts and voluble commentary that accompanied his latest during its first press screening Wednesday morning at the Cannes Film Festival. After dividing audiences here in 2011 with “Drive,” also starring Mr. Gosling, Mr. Refn is back where he doesn't belong in the main competition. To judge by the catcalls that washed over the end credits of “Only God Forgives” â€" disapproval that was challenged by the bleating of insistent yeas â€" Mr. Refn will continue to keep festivalgoers arguing about whether there's anything to his neo-exploitation beyond gore-slicked surfaces.

He certainly knows how to frame a shot and has a fine eye for wallpaper. There are a lot of opportunities to examine that wallpaper with its repeating pattern â€" nonfigurative swirls with teethlike serrations suggestive of a dragon â€" because Mr. Refn is very fond of repeating himself. Again and again, characters walk slowly through long halls decorated with this wallpaper or pose in front of it, waiting for something, anything to happen. At one point, Julian sticks his fist in a man's mouth and drags the guy down a hallway for some unexplained reason, though probably because Mr. Refn thought it looked cool. To judge by the slicing and dicing and body count, it's a fair guess that Mr. Refn spends a great deal of time thinking of putatively cool ways to kill off his characters.

There's something of a story in “Only God Forgives,” though mostly there are poses, gestures, washes of red light and rivers of blood. The Bangkok backdrop is largely incidental, mostly used for its spurious exoticism, its limping dogs and decorative whores. One such embellishment is Mai, Julian's prostitute- girlfriend (Rhatha Phongam). There's also an avenger-detective, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who goes around with an army of cops and a long sword tucked under the back of his shirt. Every so often, Chang brandishes that sword and slices through arms like buttah. In one scene, he pins a man to a chair by impaling him with chopsticks, only to then blind him with a conveniently placed fruit knife.

Thierry Frémaux, the principal programmer at Cannes, has been credited with bringing more straight-ahead commercial genre titles, including action and horror-tinged action movies, into the mix. The press hasn't always been receptive, and not necessarily because of art-film snobbism or because the movies are as risibly pretentious as “Only God Forgives.” The latest from the Japanese director Takashi Miike, “Shield of Straw,” might have received a less hostile reception Monday morning if it were not in the main competition, where it has, bafflingly, been slotted. Consistently entertaining and totally implausible, it's the kind of cop film that a Hollywood B-movie studio would have churned out in the 1940s, though with a shorter running time than this one's two hours and five minutes.

“Shield of Straw” tracks a group of detectives, including a mismatched his-and-her team, as they try to deliver a child killer to justice. The twist is that they have to dodge seemingly everyone in the country, all of whom are apparently intent on collecting the extremely high bounties the grandfather of the dead child has placed on her murderer's head. Everyone, as Jean Renoir put it in “The Rules of the Game,” has their reasons: a guard, a nurse, a passenger, a man driving by. Working with a larger budget than he generally has at his disposal, Mr. Miike keeps his characters relentlessly, effortlessly moving forward â€" in an armed convoy and on foot â€" even as they take turns discussing a mission that grows more costly both in terms of the bodies racked up and the morals corrupted.

“Shied of Straw” starts on an unlikely note only to grow more amusingly outlandish, though in truth its story isn't much different from the silly sorts that often fill in the gaps between explosions in standard-issue blockbusters. With tense showdowns and philosophical time-outs, “Shield of Straw” could actually be refitted by a big Hollywood studio as a vehicle for Bruce Willis, a natural for the role of the Last Honest Cop (a part nicely filled out here by Takao Osawa). What would be even better, of course, is for someone to pick up Mr. Miike's original for distribution in the United States, where it might find a more receptive audience than it has found here.