Pusher (1996)

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REVIEW

Another great movie, lent to me by Bryn from Horrorphile, Pusher is a Danish movie about a tough drug dealer who has the worst week of his life.

Frank is a small time dealer, who is ambitious enough to make a slow climb in the sticky world of narcotics, but he pushes his luck too far when he tries to borrow drugs from a Slavic kingpin to make a big score.

I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but touristic pictures of the Danish city make it look like an idyllic European city, with clean streets, old stone buildings mixed with the sleek lines of modern technology. Director Nicholas Winding Refn, though, isn’t interested in that Copenhagen, and in Pusher, we are treated to a story that mostly occurs at night, and in shadows.

It’s grim. You’d almost never choose to live there, and the characters that populate this film are so pale and disheveled that they’d seem to burn into ash at the first touch of sunlight.

Kim Bodnia plays Frank, and he looks like a moderately tough guy. He wears track pants and a boxer’s hoodie, and when he walks around, he glares at people. He’s a drug dealer, the type that sold bad X to your friends and smacked your other friend’s face into the wall for little reason.

We don’t hate Frank, though, and it’s through the complexity of his character that makes Pusher such a popular film around the world. The fast paced action and dirty drug dealings make for decent crime fare, and Pusher does push up the tempo to a nearly uncomfortable level, but the softer moments are when we identify with Frank.

Identify with Frank yeah, he’s a morally corrupt asshole with a violent streak, but is he a product of that underclass of society? He works hard, snorting coke to stay alert, but he’s essentially the same as a doctor or lawyer, working long hours to try to get ahead in a world that’s quickly passing by.

Several scenes show us that Frank isn’t sure about what he’s doing: eating sushi and trying to enjoy the good things in life, thinking about running away with his girlfriend, borrowing money from his mom. Frank is always on the verge of making himself better, but always yanks himself back into the underground, like he’s stirred into a thick, mushy paste of disreputable taste.

This trailer doesn’t make me want to watch the film, but gives you a nice look at some of the real bat on man violence.

Bodnia did such a fantastic job with the character of Frank revealing emotions and layers without saying much of anything that he became quite a popular actor in Europe, Refn ended up making Pusher into a trilogy, with II and III coming out in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

It’s an excellent movie perhaps what works best is that European sense of crime. unlike American crime movies, there aren’t a lot of guns, or big shootouts. This crime is permeated into the granite of the old Danish architecture, and the violence happens in small, very bloody doses, enacted with lead pipes or baseball bats, which makes it much more graphic, and terribly horrifying.

I say

A film well worth watching several times. The sparse soundtrack is used to maximum effect, with metal riffs blaring as Frank enters another dirty building.

See it for

There’s a scene at the end of the movie where Frank tries to settle his accounts with the drug lord, and has a hopefully, pleadingly happy grin on his face as he hocks his watch to make up the difference.

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