The 'Pusher' trilogy

Nicolas Winding Refn

Writers: Nicolas Wining Refn & Jens Dahl

1996, Denmark

In the tradition of notable debuts, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first film is a gritty, guerrilla- style crime drama about a loathsome, selfish small-time crook getting himself into deeper and deeper trouble, alienating himself from everyone in a spiral of self-destruction.

In an overabundance of streetwise gritty and downbeat crime thrillers, Refn's debut distinguishes itself with a compelling central performance from Kim Bodnia, a pumping soundtrack, and a hand-held camera that doesn't stray from the shoulder of a scumbag drug pusher on a self-destructive week.  And this marks out the whole ‘Pusher’ series: enthralling central performances, a guerrilla-style hand-held camera that is always pushing the incident and narrative, and a pulsating score by underground artists and Peter Peter. It makes for a riveting and kinetic aesthetic, transcending the familiarities of the story. Apparently made by Refn without any experience and a lot of moxie, certainly there’s a raw and visceral feel.

Of course, the central feature of this underworld genre is the conflict of gangster posturing with morality. But Frank (Bodnia) is wanting from the outset, and there’s a big clue in that he retreats to the immature crudity of his friend Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen). Frank’s credentials as a scumbag only become more apparent as he reacts with bad management to his ever-worsening situation, mostly by mistreating the woman he is using to hide out with. Actually, it’s the women that are key to the moral dilemmas throughout the series. But it’s not a representation of a criminal world that grants any style or psychopathic charm or flair that are so often used by the genre to mitigate the scumbags. Milo (Zlatko Buric) the drug-lord is the only one offering that “gangster flash”, but he’s decidedly bargain rate, just as shabby as he is as dangerous. This is not a community that even entertains ethics or loyalty, just the fleeting highs and business of drug pushing.

The natural lighting, the grittiness and no-budget core only serve to enhance the charmlessness of this milieu. It’s certainly a world away from the arty compositions and neons of Refn’s later work. Frank’s tale is a worn one, and maybe that itself has a point, but the bravado of the telling makes for a punch of a debut.

 

PUSHER II: With Blood on My Hands

 Writer & director: Nicolas Winding Refn

2004, Denmark-UK

A sequel with a more questioning stance of its criminal underworld: This time we concentrate on Tonny, a fearless Mads Mikkelsen, who certainly is a surprise against his more austere later roles. Here he is crude, not so smart, immature. Tonny is a scumbag but we understand why when he's immersed in such a scumbag social circle. The reappearance of drug lord Milo hints at the smallness of this world, but this sequel spreads wider.

The underworld here is synonymous with broken families, propagating more brokenness down the generations (a wedding becomes just an excuse for a strip show). Tonny, despite his head tattoo, doesn't get any respect. Everyone insults him, and he’s suppressing a lot. He's clueless but, just out of jail, also curiously willing to please, which makes him easy to sway either way and therefore more sympathetic. But why do good when good isn't rewarded? Whereas his pal Frank found there was nothing inside himself but more selfishness and trouble, Tonny’s tale is a portrait of a man with limited resources finding something deeper within himself certainly strikes a surprising chord.

Highlights include an early extended scene with Tonny with two prostitutes and clueless men changing a nappy.

PUSHER III: I Am the Angel Death

Writer & director: Nicolas Winding Refn

2005, Denmark

In which we now follow Milo, the crime lord that has played a key part in the previous films. The ‘Pusher’ trilogy ends on a kind of farce for crime lords: all Milo wants is to throw a successful 25^th party for his spoiled, bratty daughter – but he gives his crew food poisoning! a drug deal goes wrong! he has to go to the local takeaway for party food! he has to get to AA meetings! There’s nothing quite so questioning here, and the dissonance between Milo underworld status and his intention to be a generous and gregarious patriarch barely seems to cause him reflection. But the  precariousness of his status is naked here, always under threat from others as well his own cooking abilities. It all takes place over a day so there is no fallout from what we see, although by the end of it the family and the business come together seamlessly and the whole sordid mess carries on.

Again, a hypnotic central performance (from Zlatco Buric), but more vulnerable and less flamboyant than his previous appearances and a kinetic handheld camera, boosted by great music, makes this always compelling, even if treading well-worn territory. And the series ends on its most gruesome set piece that comes across as just another pratfall Milo has to deal with.

 

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As a trilogy, ‘Pusher’ soon overcomes the familiarities of its genre – and that’s part of what we came for, anyhow – to become dynamic character studies, each film bringing a different shade. There’s not even so much of the macho posturing that streaks the gangster genre – we won’t count Tonny’s immature boasting of sexual prowess – but rather people just going about their sordid lives, posturing and making stupid pronouncements, filling the roles they think they’re playing. Sometimes, they just fall for their own repeated failures of character, sometimes they manage to break away from themselves to something new without really knowing what that means, and sometimes they just grow old into it, with no real desire to transcend. Together, the ‘Pusher’ films creates a credible and raw microcosm of a degenerate corner of Copenhagen, solid character studies of unlikable protagonists that are seemingly doomed from the outset.

Too Old to Die Young

TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019,
USA, tv series

Ed Brubaker is one of the writer-creators of ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the series created with and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and in issue 5 June 2019 of ‘Criminal’ he writes in his editorial:

"It is unlike anything out there, by a wide margin, so expect weird and shocking and hypnotic and gorgeous, all at the same time. Do not expect anything resembling a traditional TV series."*

And it’s hard to argue with this. Even the FX’s series ‘Fargo’ didn’t go quite so far out into being an unapologetic ambient piece. In ‘Too Late to Die Young’, the jigsaw pieces take episodes to reveal themselves and then assemble. Like so much of TV of interest, this can be traced back to ‘Twin Peaks’ in its unwavering pursuit of mood, if not mystery. 

It starts as it means to go on, with a 360 degree pan around a parking lot for three minutes or so. Has television ever offered such a series of cinematic gorgeous long takes? This is part of the very substance of this series, languid panning shots or 360 degrees to take in the full context. Every shot is like a fashion shoot. Every doorway is like a picture frame. The use of colour and light is a natural progression from the aesthetic that Mario Bavi was using in earnest in 1964’s ‘Blood and black Lace’. See how the cool blue of the night outside offsets the orange of the bulbs hanging inside? Relish the hellish purple of the whipping barn and the deep blue of the nightclub.

 

It’s often like photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, or of David LaChappelle brought to life. The cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego Garcia is exemplary. It’s the opposite of the neo-realism or insights offered by, say, ‘The Wire’ or ‘Headhunters’, but doesn’t indulge in the magic-realism of ‘Fargo’ and its more about the visuals than even ‘Gomorrah’. Rather, it is entirely cinematic in its patience and gloss. It’s a natural extension of the kind of glamourous crime fiction aesthetic introduced by Michael Mann’s ‘Miami Vice’. Cliff Martinez’s score creeps up on you, suddenly declaring itself from its drones and shadows and when the effect of this and the visuals coalesce, it is frequently sublime. But there is a plot.

Ed Brubaker has long been a reliable and excellent writer of crime comics, and it’s his mean focus that seems to have shaved off Refn’s campier dramatics while Refn’s aloofness minimises Brubaker’s empathy. Here, we have a wealth of characters and not one is particularly likeable or redeemable. Miles Teller is Martin Jones, a corrupt cop with an under-age girlfriend, Janey (Nell Tiger Free) – she’s a prodigy, incidentally. He’s just rolling with the punches, going from corruption to corruption until he kind of stumbles upon the idea of morality and decides he wants to be a kind of ethical hitman. Teller proves a great straight man for all the offbeat tendancies, stoically spitting his way through the killings and characters. He is minimal in what he says, pausing before he says anything, but shouldn’t be underestimated: he knows just what to say to get in and out of situations; to insinuate himself with a couple of despicable pornographers or to make a man wielding a shotgun in his face just lower his guard for a crucial instant (“Your mother sent me.”).

Meanwhile, Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) is biding his time to becoming a gangster kingpin. He keeps quiet because he’s insinuating himself; he’s not one of those hotheads. Beneath this silence, though, it slowly emerges that he is hiding the most appalling ruthlessness and egotism. Set in motion by his mother’s death at the hands of the police (an assassination?) – and there’s lots of incestuous kinks at play here – he is ruthlessly setting his ducks in a row, aided by his wife (Cristina Rodlo), who has secrets of her own. Most of the eroticism is provided by them: the flesh of Aguilera and Rodlo is swooned over by the camera in equal measure with the male, the female and the gay gaze being equally used.  

Elsewhere, you can debate about who is more nutzo and enjoyable: William Baldwin’s performance as the growling father of Teller’s underage girlfriend or Hart Bochner as the police chief that treats his station as an amateur dramatics venue.

Even as it takes its time, there are plenty to twists and surprises coming and when the storylines do come together, it doesn’t waste time getting to the nub. There are many riveting sequences: gangsters druggily dancing outside their headquarters before a drive-by shooting; Jones insinuating himself with the pornographers; a car chase that grinds to a halt in the desert; The High Priestess going about her work at a motel or a bar; etc.

Deadpan and ethereal, this won’t be for everyone, but if works for you, it’s a frequently mesmerising trip sprinkled with the exclamation marks of ugly crime fiction.

 “Please. Tell me that motherfucker isn’t a real cop.”

·        * “The Secret Ingredient is Crime”, ‘Criminal’ issue 5, June 2019.

 

The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016, Denmark-France-USA

It starts with a posed vision of Elle Fanning with her throat cut as she lounges on a sofa – but it’s a fashion shoot. Right from the start, we are presented with murder as just another fashion choice – and anyone glancing over fashion spreads for a while will see that in action. Giallo thrives on such aesthetic – surely Dario Argento’s reputation rests on this. Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘The Neon Demon’ looks like it may be in the vein of Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ – more a psychological thriller with horror pretensions – and so it is as a study of fashion world femininity, but then it veers closer to Rob Zombie’s ‘The Lords of Salem’ with its accent on set design and covens. Indeed, ‘The Neon Demon’ turns out to be a far more full-blooded horror film that anticipated.

“Are you food or are you sex?” Jesse (Elle Fanning) is asked early

on, and that should be a clue. She’s a teenager coming to make it in the Californian fashion scene. Refn’s oeuvre has previously been defined by studies of masculinity – most recently with ‘Drive’ car fetish and then ‘Only God Forgives’ castration anxieties – but ‘The Neon Demon’ makes short shift of masculinity: in fact, the male characters are almost comically two-dimensional*: they’re all dodgy – although there is some amusement to seeing Keanu Reeves quite playing against type as a sleazy rapist motel owner (or is there room for doubt?). Jesse dismisses her potentially decent boyfriend (who nevertheless has designs on a minor) after he has gotten her where she wants to be and likewise the film wants to be for the girls, but it probably doesn’t totally avoid misogyny: it’s a valiant attempt but Refn is too in love with exploitation to fully achieve that (as indicated by his book of exploitation posters, ‘The Act of Seeing’). But the film most threatens to become unintentional comedy with the cartoonish males, where it’s at its most narrow and crude; it’s with the women that it achieves nuances and textures that has eluded Refn with his recent portrayals of machismo. Men maybe a problem but this is chiefly a woman’s tale of the world of predatory femininity. But this isn’t primarily about the women cowed and abused by patriarchy, but more about their relationships and uses of each

other, taking advantage to advance their status as women in this world where every shot looks like a fashion spread, gorgeously shot by Natasha Braier. When they talk and question Jesse in a women’s toilet, what initially looks like them just being both friendly and bitchy is actually their testing her credentials as a victim.

Of course, this being Refn, the symbolism is far from subtle and themes of identity will be conveyed through mirrors, the female form being drenched in born-again blood, and watch out for red being an indicator of danger, but there is some evocation in the broad strokes: for example, the moment where we think the fashion photographer is going to be abusive to Fanning’s waif gives way to a moment far more genuinely sensual if not understated when he covers her in gold paint. But actually the true core is with Jena Malone’s make-up guru Ruby: maybe simply because Malone coaxes genuine character where everyone else seems happy to just engage with the surface and symbolism of it all. When she has a sexual encounter with a cadaver, it is not only shocking and exploitation in tone but it also tells us of her vulnerability, her sadness that she will never have a relationship with Jesse and that she is trying to find intimacy with a dead thing. 

It’s in these moments where Refn uses the broad strokes and coarseness to find alternative textures and depths when not expected – similar to Paul Verhoeven – long before an eyeball is coughed up. The film has nothing new to say about the fashion world but it has a genuine strangeness. With both its coarseness and glitter, ‘The Neon Demon’ achieves some potency as a genuine arthouse and horror hybrid.

• * I would see this as a sly dig, reversing the trend that in male-dominated films the females are ordinarily underwritten, except many masculine roles have been written this way in recent Refn films.

DRIVE

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Nicolas Winding Refn
2011, USA

The turning point of Refn’s appropriation of Walter Hill and Michael Mann aesthetics, “Drive”, is surely the one scene that I initially felt to be the most problematic. The elevator scene seemed to me to encapsulate Andrew Tracey’s [Reverseshot] main objection to “Drive”: namely, it’s silliness. It is indeed the same silliness I felt afflicts some of the work of Michael Mann, whose male angst and posturing I find so unintentionally amusing (less damaging in “Manhunter”, but fatally marring “Heat”, for example). This glossy emotional gesticulating feels very much like the moody soft-pop-rock that Mann so favours on his soundtracks: appealing, easy, but ultimately shallow. Refn, too, uses an electronic soundtrack, a wonderful, retro-feeling Chris Martinez score. There’s also a silly but endearing song about heroes. However, one should not be misled that Refn is coopting Mann’s taste: throughout his career, Refn has utilised excellent, distinctive soundtracks and song choices (less self-satisfied than Tarantino; less soppy than Mann).

That pinnacle moment, the elevator scene, is where the soundtrack takes over and the movements of the characters fall into slow-motion to emphasise its poignancy. The driver and his love interest have just got into an elevator with a man who the driver knows to be a hoodlum sent to kill them. Now, at first the silliness seems to be in the way that the driver stops to steal a deep, long kiss in slow-motion rather than just deal with the hoodlum whilst he has the element of surprise. It is such a moment that critics in love with gestures rather than realism or character pragmatism really take to and buy into the sign-posted poignancy. If you are to read “Drive” for its gestures, then will probably be the great romantic moment, and certainly this is how Matt Bochenski [*littlewhitelies] reads it, without ambiguity or irony. He says, “Driver kisses her before turning on the other man. It’s a moment of exquisite and contradictory emotions – love, atonement, vengeance and rage – coalescing and combusting with startling ferocity.” Similarly, James Hansen [*Out 1 Film Journal] reads the driver as heroic. But this now brings to the controversy of “Drive”.

There is the amusing tale of the woman trying to sue the film distributor for leading her to believe she was going to see another “The Fast and The Furious” film. Well, entertaining as that is, one can see a certain point: when I first saw the trailer for “Drive”, I was as disinterested as I ordinarily am with any trailer going through its tedious litany of clichés; but then I saw it was directed by Refn, and I was interested, certain that it was being misrepresented, mispackaged. Which it was. Because the car chases are probably not what you are going to remember about “Drive”. One might even wish there had been more footage of his stunt driver work, and his heist work. But no: what likely to remember is the violence, because when “Drive” lets loose, it is extremely crunchy and violent. I see this again as further evidence of how the influence of ‘extreme cinema’ of the preceding decade has trickled upwards into more mainstream titles. Many of its detractors have turned aggressively against “Drive” in response to the shocking violence.

But it seems to me that the driver is not heroic, although he is an anti-hero. He is not simply romantically detached or mostly alienated from the world around him, in the old school manner of stoic, mostly silent troubled men of action who, nevertheless, live by a code. He is - as apparently Ryan Gosling also feels - psychotic. We know this as soon as he responds relentlessly, consummately during the motel attack. He has preternatural abilities with violence when under assault. This then is why he is detached and sits at home playing with car parts, but then he gets somewhat gets involved with the girl next door and her son. He seems to be eying romance and the domestic with longing, but he knows what he is. He is, after all, a getaway driver for unpleasant people. He knows: and so when he kisses her in the elevator, even though this seems a ridiculous thing to do when under threat in close confines, he does so because he knows that when he does indeed attack the hoodlum, any chance he has with her will be gone because there shall be no disguising that truth about him (and perhaps if she does accept what he is, perhaps she isn’t his idyll after all). And indeed, the head-stomping is horrifying, and it is not abbreviated; it is excessive in a way that goes beyond self-preservation. It is psychotic. And she stands there and watches and she sees what he is and what he is capable of. And for this reason, I came to change my mind and believe that the elevator scene was the pinnacle of the film, and that it did indeed work after all. We may revel in the driver’s ability to best the bad guys with violence that matches if not supersedes theirs, in the manner that we revel in power and revenge fantasies, but it is also psychotic and surely does not meet the criteria of heroism. It is, like much of Refn’s oeuvre, another portrait of an incredibly, horrifying violent man trying to hold things together. We see evidence of this from his first feature “Pusher” right through “Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising”. And he is very good at painting these portraits, however similar thematically, through varying shades of different genres. Here, the stripped down romantically inclines thriller gives his violent man tale a pretty and soft veneer with a shattering centre. Some may see the driver as Steve McQueen cool, but that surely is not the truth of it. (And all this and the accomplished retro-feel, one can only imagine what Refn might have done, or could still do with Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho".)

Refn sees “Drive” in terms of a fairy-tale, which implies that those metaphysical and symbolic gestures are actually treated in earnest. Refn directs both stylishly and bluntly so that the effect is disorienting, as if the sleek gloss of ’Eighties Hollywood never went out of fashion, but interrupted by the shock of recent extreme cinema. It is like Scorsese, Mann, Walter Hill, Gasper Noe, Takashi Miike are all being shaken in a cocktail glass of blood and grue. The characters are indeed mostly ciphers and that is mostly the point. Carey Mulligan, for example, is just a pretty porcelain face and little else, and perhaps her vapidity – unconvincing as she is as a single mother – is what attracts her to the driver. (And she, too, is a mostly wordess character flirting with violence, as her attraction for the driver and her just-out-of-jail husband hints; what does she see in them?). And “Drive” may well also feature “Ron Perlman, giving perhaps his first bad performance” [*A. Tracey] But its silliness is more to do with the fact that Refn’s film has everything to do with cinematic reality, gently nodding at archetypes so hard in order to make them totems and symbolic, not only clichés. It’s more in tune with the real world than Tarantino or your average Hollywood actioner, but only by a matter of degrees. It is the style, the mood, Ryan Gosling, the everso-slightly dreamy momentum and indulgences that make “Drive” transcend its pretensions and clichés. It is like a New Wave synthesiser being smashed up with a punk guitar. It’s a bloody marshmellow, a beguiling bone-based cake that allows a fan to give in to cinematic artifice and the pleasures of a typical genre piece told with just a touch of dazzle and insight. In that way, “Drive” is probably both less and more than it seems and as engrossing and dazzling piece of artifice as you are likely to see in the post-noir era.

VALHALLA RISING

NICOLAS WINDING REFN
2009 - Denmark/UK

In some ways, “Valhalla Rising” feels like a debut from a director come from making experimental short films which have been successful due to a triumph of atmospherics hung upon an ambitious but thin story. Director Nicolas Winding Refn is in fact a Danish director that has a commendable list of films exploring male violence which are both naturalistic in characdterisation and given to stylistic tics: “Bleeder”, “Pusher” and its sequels, “Bronson”. “Valhalla Rising” is a superficially different beast, taking a Viking drama and conveying it through a fog of dour atmospherics and often pretty visuals; again, like a young director exceeding the limitations of budget by sheer aspiration and verve. And, like many student films, there is a certain uncertainty of performance, despite the experience of the cast, threatening to sabotage the illusion of a visit back through time. Viking dialogue - which is a chief weakness - is conveyed in low, undecided tones as opposed to what we might mostly be used to: those grand gestures and intonations of other historical epics. But, despite the visuals and the grand intentions of this journey into the heart of darkness, there is something in the space left around the dialogue that leaves it feeling weak and searching for a hold. Refn’s intention seems to be to produce a neo-realistic tone, but the performances seem un-buffered whenever dialogue is spoken. It feels adrift somewhere between Harmony Korine’s guerrilla aesthetic and Zack Snyder’s infamous “300” stylisation, with a reach for Werner Herzog and even Tarkovsky’s elemental fascination.

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Nevertheless, there is Mads Mikkelsen, who gives a wordless but magnetic performances that keeps the film grounded. Part ravaged hunk, part super-killing machine, an enslaved warrior robbed of one eye and his humanity. One-eye is kept caged and let out only to win fights: scarred up and seemingly forever on the verge of slaughtering anyone in front of him, initially his tale promises an study of the mystery and violence of this silent killing machine. The British Momentum Pictures promotional packaging uses cues familiar from Snyder’s “300”, giving the impression of a blood-soaked war epic with Mikkelsen leading a helmeted army, and none of which represents the film at all. Although “Valhalla Rising” is arguably just as stylised, it is far from the pulp absurdities of “300”. Almost all the gore and violence is up front in the film - including an unforgettable evisceration - for when One-Eye is free and we might presume a tale of extended wrath, he acquires a friendless boy (Maarten Stevenson) as a kind of spokesman and finds himself joined up with a small gang of crusading Christians. They are setting out to create a New Jerusalem - or rather, their apparent religious leader is and the others seem along for the promised treasures the conquered Holy Land will bring them.

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Then follows what may be, the gut-wrenching and bleak early passages aside, the film’s most successful sequence. The boat journey combines the elements of odyssey, otherworldiness, silence, naturalism and formal experimentation with pace, plotting and location that Refn otherwise struggles for elsewhere. Others may find this sequence interminable, for it is here that Refn goes from brooding, slow-paced doom with spasms of violence to a more dissonant sense of plot and increasingly abstract meaning. The claustrophobia of the boat is tangible, seemingly stranded in fog and undergoing a passage into another world as surely as the Bowman going through the light-show of “2001”.
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“Valhalla Rising” is an antidote to the bombast of so many other historical warrior epics. It is not grandiose like a Ridley Scott recreation; it’s visuals and beauty rely not upon set-design but the natural world, the foggy mountains and damp rock faces, the doomy and drained landscapes, accompanied by a heavily ambient soundtrack. It is a brief tale: gaining his freedom as a slave for fighting, One-Eye goes to hell, those around him find nothing and go to pieces, and he finally meets red Devils. It is a exercise in anti-climax, a heart of darkness that goes nowhere and probably signifies very little. Had Refn lost many of its modern stylistic affectations, it may have headed in the direction of, for example, “The Valley of the Bees” in recreating a long lost era in a realistic manner. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, “Valhalla Rising” remains a fascinating experiment throughout.