Drive unabashedly draws from the seminal 1978 noir, The Driver: even if Winding Refn's claim not to have seen Walter Hill's film until having started work on this one is to be believed, he has acknowledged its influence on the writer of Drive's source novel. By a bizarre and surely unintentional coincidence, the antihero is even played by another Ryan; Gosling instead of O'Neal, and they share a mix of cockiness tinged with melancholy. But the two films are still different animals: whereas Hill's was a more straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller with Bruce Dern's cop determined to reel the rogue in, Winding Refn, as always, is more interested in the existential angle. In that, while both filmmakers are obviously indebted to Le Samourai, it's the latter who is more in line with the Melvillian philosophy. Gosling's character is a self-contained robot who is later forced to feel.
The spark for the transformation is affection for Carey Mulligan's single mother, but there's no stock physical consummation between them: the relationship retains the idealised distance of a fairytale. The rest of the film is consistent with this ethereal air: neon lights flash by, a determinedly '80s retro synth soundtrack pounds away and conversations fade out with more implied than said. It's brazenly stylised, übercool, and yet in the end, unexpectedly sad.
7/10
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