When Nicolas Winding Refn‘s name appears as a director on the poster, we can be sure that this is a special film, a film that will surprise us, a film that in some respects resembles nothing from what we have seen so far on screens. This is the case with ‘Pusher‘, his feature film debut in 1996, which concluded the northern film festival at our local cinematheque. In this film, as in the others that followed in his career, Refn does not make concessions to viewers and does not try to please. He films in non-commented documentary style, and it does not make our life easy, leaving us, the spectators, to gradually and effortlessly guess the story, the conflicts and the psychological profiles of the characters. His shooting style – with the camera on his shoulder and at the level of the eyes of the characters most of the time – invites us to see the film and get to know the characters as if it were a fragment of our own lives.
The story and the characters seem to be known from many other similar films. A drug dealer gets in trouble with the gangs of organized crime, is called upon to pay his debts, is caught by the police at the wrong moment, and gets into problems that are becoming increasingly critical from day to day over one single week in which the action takes place. The guy (played exceptionally by Kim Bodnia) is a walking catastrophe, a minor ‘bad guy’ that gets in trouble with stronger and worse ‘bad guys’. The only ray of humanity in his life is his connection with a strip-tease dancer (Laura Drasbæk) but there is not much hope in this relationship either. The background of the action are the streets and the bars of the less privileged neighborhoods of Copenhagen, filmed especially at night.
I do not avoid the more difficult films, and I acknowledge that the way the films are made is often more interesting than the story itself. This is the case of ‘Pusher‘, which uses many techniques borrowed from experimental art cinema such as the French New Wave (filming on the streets, direct sound output, mix of amateur and professional actors) to bring to screen a gangster story in the style of American films of the 1970s, but which switches the urban jungle with the less priviledged streets of Copenhagen. Many of the techniques used in the film are in line with the ‘Dogme 95’ manifesto although Refn was not a declared supporter of this current. And yet something does not connect very well and the collage seems a little forced. Nicolas Winding Refn is a director who likes experiments, who surprises and tests his viewers in each film. This was his debut film, and he may have wanted to prove that he is already master of the skills of the profession and creative in it. But the emotion and the human dimension? These are more present in the way the secondary characters are constructed than in the main story. Of his films that I saw, the one I liked the most was ‘Drive‘ where a familiar story (there also) known was superimposed on interesting characters who lived an unusual and unspoken love story. Here, in ‘Pusher‘, there is one single such a moment of emotion, but it passes too quickly. This is probably what I missed watching the movie.