Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy, recently released in a handsome blu-ray slipcase set by Second Sight films, not only offer a hectic thug’s eye view of Copenhagen low-life, they also ask two very important questions. One, who is the titular pusher, and two, what does any of this have to do with a Japanese video game auteur (OK, maybe that one’s just me).
I’ll answer the second one first, if I may — Winding Refn, as any fule know, mocapped Heartman in Hideo Kojima’s incredible but divisive Death Stranding games, and Mads Mikkelsen, who made his movie debut in the first of the three Pushers, plays Clifford Unger in the first game. All you can really learn from this, however, is that Kojima is friends with ALL the cool kids.
Pusher was also Refn’s movie debut, but it’s shot with such style and class you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, other than a lack of expensive flashy effects (which wouldn’t have suited it anyway), made in 1996 for an estimated six million kroner or about 444 thousand British quid. Had to look that up.
In fact, the first time I watched it many years ago, I kinda wished I’d checked the exchange rate first, as I kept wondering whether this was a really high-stakes affair or just people getting worked up over very little, because I had no conception of the sums of money involved. Turns out it’s somewhere in between. It’s definitely enough to get very worried about if you’re a small-time gangster.
But the story it tells is timeless — man owes money to other man (here played by Zlatko Burić, double award-winner for his performance in Triangle Of Sadness), other man is probably going to kill him unless he gets it. But it’s what he does with that story that really makes it pop.
Refn is often accused of favouring style over substance, though in art that’s not always a bad thing, especially when the style is so — well, stylish. But here, there’s as much meat on the bone as any Martin Scorsese epic, while the familiar Refn style is already present. Dude’s got an eye, is all I’m sayin’.
Tonny takes centre stage in Pusher II, having just emerged from prison. And again, the braggadocio fails, particularly in a hilarious but incredibly awkward scene involving some sex workers. Discovering he’s a father, he finds himself snorting his way through a series of calamities as he struggles with the role he wants, and the one he’s found himself having to play.
But with no Frank, we return to the first of the two important questions — and, like Abed in Community when he takes a media studies course on “Who IS the boss in Who’s The Boss?”, we wonder “Who’s the Pusher?” Of course, it’s Burić’s deliciously Jabba the Hutt-esque Milo, with whom Tonny once more finds himself entangled.And it’s Milo to whom our focus turns in trilogy closer Pusher 3. But here we see a very different side to him — that of the loving father. In a neat yet somehow inevitable twist of fate, the newly-clean Milo is cracking under the strain of catering for his daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party. I’ve always thought that a good thriller and a good farce are almost exactly the same thing, just with different stakes, and Burić straddles the two genres effortlessly as his two worlds begin to encroach on one another.
Each film stands alone, but it seems weird that anyone would do that when they could just binge the lot. The new Second Sight release offers the perfect opportunity to do that, along with a 120-page book of essays and a collection of five art cards. I wish I could tell you the first one’s free, but it isn’t. It, and the others, however, are well worth paying for.-Justin Farrington-
