Review of Pusher

Introduction

Nicolas Winding Refn’s debut feature, a coasting, discursive, realist’s epic of desperation and paranoia, is certainly grimly authentic in its portrayal of a gutter-rat Copenhagen dealer (Kim Bodnia) who gets into hot water with his more than slightly shady boss (Zlatko Buric) after a dope deal goes haywire. However, with its rambling, distended mock-documentary structure, its vaguely reactionary tone and its derivative race-against-time concept, Refn spreads his intense visual design too thin.

Video

In keeping with the film’s mucky, underexposed photographic style, the transfer for ‘Pusher’ is far better than its recent transfer for television and video (its TV premiere on Channel 4 was a blurry, muddy disaster). In fact, in its own pseudo-documentary way, the film has probably never looked better: the sleazy, harshly-lit locales evoke a nervous energy all their own. The smoky, unclean ‘hit and run’ visual improvisation is full of bleeding lens dilution and engulfing shadows that seem to swallow up everything in their path. ‘Pusher’s less than perfect visual transfer actually makes for a more effective experience.

Audio

Badly recorded sound all round. Pusher’s mix of real-life ambience and pounding heavy metal on the soundtrack is somewhat jarring, but complementary enough.

Features

Witty ‘Making of’ documentary, complete with unintentionally hilarious cigar-chomping European film-honcho and brief clips from Refn’s frankly awful short-film. Best of all is Bodnia’s complete lack of enthusiasm for his profession and Refn’s amusing, near Schrader-like obsession with firearms. Refn comes across as Travis Bickle meets Tarantino. Loads of trailers: for ‘Pusher’, and more interestingly, for its follow-up companion, ‘Bleeder’ which appears to feature many of the same characters and situations. Some cast and crew bios, plus a commentary track by Refn and a fairly nondescript American associate whose name slipped by me, that is vaguely self-congratulatory, but amusing and oddly amiable, given the film’s seedy atmosphere.

Conclusion

Clearly inspired by the films of John Cassavetes: somber emotional core, buoyed by a visceral hand-held shooting style and lengthy, often meandering narrative sensibility. Unfortunately, Refn’s film, unlike Cassavetes, is largely witless, depthless and possesses a surprisingly conservative attitude towards sex/violence and drug abuse. Unlike the sensationalists of the neo-exploitation European cinema (Jan Kounen, Catherine Breillat) Refn has little desire in raising his social and emotionally deviant characters to fashionable heights and instead shows us their often bleak existence from the inside-out, rather than wallowing in the depravity like many others.

The performances are wildly variable: Bodnia is effective, the melting of his street-wise armor is gripping and believable. Laura Drasbaek, as Bodnia’s junkie/hooker girlfriend has a crumbling, clandestine innocence and their fractured, unspoken plutonic relationship makes for a touching counterpoint to the bloody beatings, shootings and graphic drug-abuse. Refn’s decision to use non-actors and amateurs is a mixed blessing, both increasing naturalism and creating a number of performances that often stray wildly out of character or fail to develop any character at all.

On the plus side, Refn’s bleakly traditionalist tone makes a change from a seemingly endless succession of ‘Pulp Fiction’/‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ style ultra-violent gangster comedies that are saturating the cinematic landscape. Films to whom a savage act of violence makes for top-drawer entertainment. Although this lengthy, humorless exercise in street-level authenticity is well-played by its lead, it not only lacks dimension in both tone and emotion but fails to deliver anything we haven’t seen before. Suggestions? For mock-documentaries at their most shocking, nothing can best Belgium’s ‘Man Bites Dog’. And for an urban landscape of chilling realism, ‘La Haine’ is an obvious, but far more rewarding choice. In other words, not bad, but easily bettered.