Pusher

PUSHER (Nicolas Winding Refn - Denmark 1996)

A genuinely original and completely fresh take on the gangster genre by first time Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, giving us an insight in the live of Frankie, a lowlife Copenhagen drug-pusher. The film follows his day-to-day pusher-routine during a crucial week in his life but in this particular week things go wrong, as he sets up a heroine deal with a former mate of him, that goes completely bust because the police was informed. He is arrested but is released soon. Problem is, he lost the drugs AND a lot of money and now owes big time to one of the most dangerous criminals in town, a Balkan low-life Yugoslav mafia type, named Milo. Now he desperately tries to find money to repay him in what is very likely to be the last week of his life.

There must have been some buzz about this movie when it came out in 1996, but it completely passed me by. Luckily I managed to catch up at the 2006 International Film Festival Rotterdam when hordes of people were attending a screening of the complete Pusher-trilogy ( a bit too much for me at the time, it was sold out anyway). At the same time, Nicolas Winding Refn, was giving an intriguing interview for quite a huge crowd. He had a very dry sense of humor and a scene from MEAN STREETS by Martin Scorsese was shown as his main inspiration for this film, so it stuck with me and I simply had to see it for myself.

A tense, exciting storyline, executed in a raw almost documentary-like fashion with a hand-held camera, this film grabs you by the collar and never lets go once it's gets going. Not for the squeamish though, as the sometimes very violent and intense confrontations come very unexpected. Kim Bodnia, who was equally outstanding in NATTEVAGTEN (1994) is exceptionally good. His character, Frank, doesn't invoke much sympathy, but somehow he manages to make his character very much alive and even touching at times. The rest of the cast is equally good with some truly extraordinary performances.

Camera Obscura --- 9/10

Nicolas Winding Refn modernized the crime film genre with his Pusher trilogy. Thinking about that and the era he made the first part makes you probably think of another crime film modernizer of the 90's, Quentin Tarantino. He made something totally new in the United States with three crime films: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997). People often see Tarantino as one of the most important directors in the crime genre, because he influenced it a lot. In the same way Nicolas Winding Refn made something completely original. He made Pusher. A movie about a drug-dealer who gets into a debt swirl. The way Refn shows the lives of the criminals is harsh. It's different from other 90's crime films, because it doesn't show any glamor in the underworld life. No one has got expensive cars, all of them live in their cruddy apartments, they aren't that rich and they all are under the control of their addiction to drugs.

Pusher is about a drug-dealer, Frank (Kim Bodnia) whose life isn't pretty. His only relationships are with his friend Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) and with his "girlfriend" Vic (Laura Drasbæk). When a Serbian drug-courier comes to Copenhagen and Frank fails to deliver money to him, he gets into a debt swirl.

Frank is portrayed as an ordinary guy, who is a juvenile child under his hard shelf. He even goes to get money from his mother when he needs to pay his debts. All the conversations he has with his friend Tonny are about blow jobs, strippers and prostitutes. The dialog is sharp and it's well made to feel like common everyday chat.

The film is very fast-paced and it's colored with some aggressive punk music, which I enjoyed a lot. It added a great element to Frank's life full of loneliness and despair. Pusher is a great description of the underworld in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's excessive realism and doesn't add any glamor to the lives of the junkies. It deals with the problems that are out there and with us every day, no matter where you live.

Frank is a drug dealer moving heroin between the level above him and his customer base. When he is asked to get 200 grams of dope in less than 24 hours he balks but when he is offered 700 on the gram he tries to pull it together. Already 50,000 in debt to local gangster Milo, Frank takes a risk and gets the drugs on credit ahead of a good sale. However when the sale goes down the police are tipped off and the only thing saving Frank from jail is his quick wits to dive into the lake and destroy the evidence against him. Released by the police within hours, Frank knows his problems are only beginning as he now owes even more money to Milo – a man not known for his patience.

Although I had not really heard any hype over this film, I had heard it compared to Mean Streets in style so I thought I would give it a try. The main thing that struck me was how gritty it was and how lacking in the style and pop culture that the post-Tarantino audience have become accustom to. For some viewers this may be taken as a complaint but for my money it made the film that much better as a piece of dramatic realism as opposed to a modern thriller. Of course "reality" is a loose term in regards this film because I hope I never see this as a world I recognise, but it is still one that I found convincing.

Refn's direction helps it by being hand-held and mobile in lots of good locations – the viewer never feels like they are on a set or with jobbing actors. It is perhaps a bit too gritty and slow for some tastes though but I didn't really find much wrong with it in what it tried to do. Perhaps I would have gone for a bit more character development and emotion or maybe it could have lost a bit of running time and been tighter for it, but mostly it was effectively desperate, gritty and with a good feeling of claustrophobic hopelessness. Bodnia does this aspect really well; he is an unsympathetic character but we are taken along with him as he is convincingly real. The film belongs to him but the support cast is mostly good with turns from Buric, Drasbæk, Labovic and Mikkelsen.

Overall then a convincing and gritty crime story that reeks of fear and being trapped. It avoids the trappings of modern Tarantino style and instead keeps low to the street, meaning that it does well by aiming for its own target and hitting it consistently.

Wow, I've just watched it. Probably, it'd be better to just lay back, think about the movie and, only after cooling down on emotions, review it.

But not this one.

"Pusher" tells us the story of, perhaps, the worst week of Frank's life, a 'middleweight' dealer caught in an unpayable debt to pay to Eastern European type mafia. And as his story unfolds, your blood pressure will rise just like the incredible tension increasing throughout the movie. No wonder, the debt grows higher and higher every day. Will Frank be able to ever repay it? Its just like the tag-line says:

"You've got no chance! Grab it!"

The fresh thing about this movie is that it shows what is actually happening somewhere in the middle of the 'food-chain' of drug dealing. Not at the top, covered by movies such as Casino, Scarface, Blow, or any other high budget movie made in Hollywood. After all Copenhagen is just not a world of amazing luxury and incredible piles of coke here and there. But the movie doesn't follow another cliché' either. It doesn't show us the bottom, where junkies scavenge on each other, sell their mothers for a gram of heroin, a topic which is usually covered by some low-budget off-movies.

Pusher is the ultimate, pure, refined truth about drug dealing. I have a personal experience, myself being for a time an immigrant into Denmark (I've never been a criminal or ever wanted to be, though, just to clarify that matter). And some guys, that I've came across upon coming here, went into this businesses and well, they all hit rock bottom. OK, the movie is hard to get into with its dramatic realism, but I assure you: this movie is as close to coarse truth and gritty reality as it gets!

Although i've heard only good things about Pusher, it took me several years to pick it up. The result was surprisingly good.

The movie is shot almost as a documentary, which is well suited for the subject it depicts. Unlike hip-hop videos advertising gangster lifestyle, Pusher shows us the reality of a low level drug dealer. There is no glamor, but rather hard labor without strict working hours providing questionable financial gain.

Serbian gangsters are depicted rather realistically, presumably due to Slavko Labović'S experience as bouncer and mingling in the appropriate milieu.

Despite its independent funding, Pusher is rubbing shoulders with the best gangster movies of all times.