There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has
been one of them. (Naked City, ending)
There's a hundred streets in this city. You don't need to
know the route. (Drive, opening)
There’s more similarity between Drive and noir classic Naked
City than grammar structures and language rhythm. Both films use specificity of location
extensively; LA’s wide boulevards, sports arena, strip mall restaurants and
river serve as settings for important actions in Drive. And this LA is a complicated, corrupt, claustrophobic world
where innocents are in grave danger, unrecognized conspiracies menace, and taciturn characters speak little. Low angle cinematography and shadows also
play an important role here. The
scene where Driver steps back out of the light after killing his first two attackers
is such a heavy use of shadow that it would be at home in a classic noir.
Drive goes further than a lot of noir does, though. The film has an intense, compelling opening that
marries muscle car film convention to noir lighting and suspense. The image of the helicopter light searching
for the car is as tense and arty as any shot of noir police hunting for a
fugitive. And Nicolas Winding Refn’s
soundtrack adds to the tension throughout the scene with the sports announcer
calling a game on the radio and the car engine racing and quieting down rapidly.
As Refn’s effective use of soundtrack throughout suggests,
Drive veers from noir grammar in several other ways. For example, there is no femme fatal to bring
the hero down; instead, Driver is trying to save an innocent Irene from the
complicated tentacles of corruption around them both. And the focus of this film, while partly about
solving the complicated mystery, is also about what happens to a man who tries
to fight such decay. Driver starts the film
as an isolated warrior with rules and a code, but his movement is increasingly into violence even as he reaches out to Irene. His character arc leads simultaneously toward social
integration as well as toward horrible, graphic, gory violence as Driver finds
he must fight evil by drawing on that within him that addresses the darkness
around him
Stylish, noir and intense, Drive is a great, if disturbing, ride.
