The Pusher movies are all about maturity, what we do to escape it and what happens when it catches up to us anyway. This is a life no one escapes until they do, and that includes writer and director Nicholas Winding Refn. The original Pusher was expanded from a short movie and served as his directorial debut. He returned to the world after his first Hollywood movie, Fear X, was a flop and returned to the scene of the crime multiple times since then. Once for a third, and darkest entry in the trilogy, twice for remakes that exist in the complex meta-fictional and grey streets that Trinity once warned Neo not to go down. The same story but different actors, mostly. The same world but a different location. I like to think of all the various incarnations of John Luther watching all the various incarnations of Frank run, knowing there’s no escape. Until, sometimes, there is.
Video Description: In the trailer for Pusher, Kim Bodnia plays Frank, a small-time drug dealer who through a series of inevitable bad choices and bad luck, finds himself forced to conduct an impossible task or flee for his life from Copenhagen, his home.
The first movie is fronted by Kim Bodnia, who would go on to massive success in both The Witcher and Killing Eve and fronted is the word that defines Frank. A small-time Copenhagen drug dealer with a cheerfully incompetent thug sidekick Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) and a debt to a Serbian drug lord, Milo (Zlatko Burić). The three men dance around one another in the complex, and yet depressingly simple walt of imminent but repressed violence. Bodnia seethes, pulsing with a nervous energy that’s all fraying, burning front to a terrible self-awareness. Frank knows he’s small time and hates that. When he’s, inevitably, caught the movie gives us it’s one action sequence and a definitive statement of intent. Frank and Tonny are chased through Copenhagen by the police, Frank falls in Sankt Jørgen’s Lake, destroying the heroin and getting him further into debt. He’s furious at himself, not just for the screw up but for the fact he’s human, mortal, unlucky. The scene lasts under two minutes but it’s a pivot for the entire movie, a moment of pathos in a movie whose fists are permanently clenched and it’s followed by the one piece of locked down, ugly violence the movie allows itself. Frank discovers Tonny ratted him out, tracks him down and beats him with a baseball bat. He doesn’t even try and reason with him, doesn’t try and kill him. It’s an economic transaction. Tonny gets to avoid prison, Frank gets to fuck him up, but not too badly. Pragmatism disguised as maturity, defined by a baseball bat in the hands of a furious, terrified arrested (in every sense) adolescent.
The second half of the movie sees Refn play with the sort of narrative gearshift he’d become exceptional at. Frank essentially goes on holiday from his own life, moving into denial and in with Vic, played by Laura Drasbæk, his lover. They pretend to be happy, Frank pretends to be normal. He grabs the illusion of maturity and stability and clings onto it until it breaks, sending him tumbling back down to what he always was. A petty criminal, soaked to the skin, waiting for death, or prison, or both. Disgusted with himself. Furious at everything. A man made entirely of escape and the inability to do so. Something has to change, and Refn finds catharsis and closure in that lack of closure, the movie ending with Frank living, for the moment, so he can live for the moment.
Video description: In the trailer for Pusher 2, Tonny, played by Mads Mikkelsen, discovers he has a baby son and must balance his newfound responsibilities with the contempt his family holds for him and the growing realisation the feeling is mutual.
Pusher II opens with Tonny doing something stupid and ends with him doing something stupider. One of them is the right choice, Mikkelsen, who also made his feature debut with Pusher, retunes to the role and vanishes into it. Tonny’s shaved head carries the word RESPECT on the back and that’s what he spends the movie seeking but never finding. Where Frank chose to play happy families, Tonny is told he has a son at the same time as he’s estranged from his own father, The Duke, played with exhausted contempt by Leif Sylvester. A respected gangster, The Duke is a patriarch who exists in conversation with Milo, also glimpsed here. Zlatko Burić’s reptilian chef is a Mussolinian figure, amiably making food while plotting the demise of others. Sylvester’s Duke is grim to the point of pomposity, a man painfully aware of who he is and how that’s all he knows to be. Tonny’s discovery he has a stepbrother reads like genetic reputation laundering and the Duke strides around the movie like the disapproving patriarch of Charles Dickens’ most violent novel. It’s not that Tonny isn’t an idiot, or a fuck up. He is. But he’s that at least partially because of how much his father has told him he is.
Mikkelsen is fantastic here, sitting back in Refn’s combination of kitchen sink drama and violence with remarkable comfort. Bodnia’s Frank, referenced as simply not being in Cophenhagen here, railed against his status. Tonny tries to live inside it, until at last he realises he has no other choice. Frank was a victim of the system, his maturity arriving too late to do him any good. Tonny, in the third act especially, finds himself in a complimentary but different spot. He’s not a good man but as the third act progresses we see him realise he’s as good as his son w ill get. Tonny’s a punchline, and one of the movie’s few jokes features him trying and failing to vandalize an apartment. But Tonny’s also a father and a crook and a fuck up and an abuse survivor. Mikkelsens’ lidded brooding hides multitudes here and the third act is a hard watch in the best of ways as this relentlessly downtrodden man suddenly pushes back. People in Tonny’s position only get one chance to do this and he succeeds, at terrible cost to himself but perhaps not to his son. They flee, towards adulthood, maturity, literally anywhere other than Copenhagen. Maybe Frank will be there to meet them. Living, for the moment.
Pusher is about a man learning he’s been lying to himself. Pusher II is about a man learning that the truth is he was doomed from the start. Both Frank and Tonny make it out of their lives through force of will and possible, off-screen violent death. Milo, in the spotlight in Pusher 3, isn’t as lucky and doesn’t deserve to be.
Video Description: In the trailer for Pusher 3, Zlatko Burić’s Milo struggles and fails to balance getting clean, running a restaurant, being an increasingly outdated drug lord and the demands of his family.
Zlatko Buric’s kingpin is in the spotlight for this trilogy capper and he’s not happy about it. He’s immobile, a patriarchal rock the movie revolves around and, for a while, the Copenhagen drug scene. But from the moment the movie opens, Milo is on the backfoot. He’s used his own supply, to the point he’s going to NarcAnon meetings and it’s not taking because he’s still dealing, still using. His family exploit him just as he exploits his clients, there are drugs on the streets he can’t understand and he’s as angry as he is increasingly, frightened. Frank and Tonny were small time and knew it. That was the closest they had to strength. Milo has become small time and when he realises how weak that’s made him it’s too late in every sense.
Buric’s screen presence across the entire trilogy is impossible to look away from because it’s often so mild. He cooks, not for theatre, but because he genuinely loves it. Cooking is his one positive, where Val was Frank’s and his son was Tonny’s. Frank was a pusher, Tonny was a pusher, Milo pushed and making food for his friends and family is the positive mask he puts on that need to control what other people consume, and the enforced relationship with him that’s the price. The movie is at it’s best when that relationship is shattered by the needs of Milo’s ‘other job’ and the illusion that’s a different life. Frank’s self-realization is literal cold water to the face. Tonny’s is his brutal emancipation from his family. Milo’s is bad fish. He can’t even cook properly anymore, the food poisoning he gives his thugs demonstrating that.
Refn walks his through doomed leads closer to violence across the trilogy. Frank is denied his bloody-knuckled catharsis. Tonny gets to flee the scene of his crime. Milo has to clean up his mess. Defending a prostitute from a violent attack, Milo murders two men with a hammer in his restaurant. t’s a brutal offhand scene, shot with the locked and clear eye that would make Ryan Gosling‘s Julian Thompson being beaten to death by Vithaya Pansringarm‘s Liuetenant Chang at the end of Only God Forgives as compelling as it was hard to look away from. The violence is transitory. The consequences obstinately remain cooling on the restaurant floor.
Milo solves his problem by going to the one place Frank and Tonny can’t; his past. Radovan, played by Slavko Labović, is a presence across all three movies. A softly spoken, polite man who works for Milo, he dreams of leaving the life and setting up a restaurant. He succeeds too, until Milo calls in a favour. The final scenes of the movie are Radovan schooling his old boss in the act of body disposal. The two men lay Milo’s restaurant out as an abbatoir and dismember Milo’s victims. Milo is visibly horrified, Radovan is not.
Milo is everything Frank and Tonny aren’t; mature, connected, resourceful, definitively alive as the movie ends. But to do that, he taints his entire life, with the help of his only friend, a man who has no issue destroying other humans. As an aside, Slavko Labović who plays Radovan is a public defender of noted war crminal Radovan Karadžić and it’s impossible for that to not colour how you see how his work, or Radovan. Or, for that matter, the end of the movie. Milo, at his beautiful house, hands free, clean of everything but his own knowledge, staring blankly into his empty swimming pool. Maturity not as escape but as prison. Hands washed but never clean. A bloody kitchen. The film not as a starting point, but as a prison, even at the end of a trilogy.
The Pusher movies are bitter in every sense, deliberately paced, hard to love but often extraordinary. All three lead actors have gone onto mainstream success, but these movies remain a high point in their work and Refn’s. This collection is a fantastic introduction to them, especially as it includes Gambler, the feature length documentary explaining how Refn had to come back to the series and Poul Nyrup’s trilogy of 1960s youth films, which Raefn cites as a major influence.
The Pusher trilogy is available now from Second Sight. Many thanks to them for the provided review copy.