Like Walter Hill’s The Driver back in 1978, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive opens with a downtown car chase, though it swaps out the Ryan at the wheel: this time it’s Gosling instead of O’Neal, but he still pays the Driver, a getaway man of few words and many strict professional guidelines. This Driver, however, operates in a European vision of 21st-century Los Angeles, working part-time for a garage and part-time for the movies while getting more involved than he should with both the mob (based in the thoroughly criminal San Fernando Valley) and the mom next door in his Westlake apartment building.
The video essays of “Los Angeles, the City in Cinema” examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the city itself.
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