Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn made his name with 1996’s low-budget, gritty crime drama Pusher. On the streets of Copenhagen, minor hustler Frank (Kim Bodnia) finds himself in debt to a local drug lord and must scrounge together the money in the next 24 hours – or else.
The pattern repeats itself, with different leads, in Pusher II and Pusher III. These films offer different leads: II gives expands the tiny part of Tonny, played by Mads Mikkelsen, who had been a minor player in the first film; and, following the pattern, the minor character of Radovan (Slavko Labović) takes over for the finale.
Refreshingly, for a trilogy, each instalment improves upon its predecessor. You can watch Refn’s growth both as a director and a storyteller, with each successive protagonist becoming a deeper, more human, unlikelier (anti-)hero.
As amateurish and rough-hewn as these violent, very masculine, somewhat dated pictures are they’re undeniably memorable and unmissable for fans of Refn or for crime cinema more generally. Additionally, home media fans get to experience one of the odder sets of special features assembled for a film. There are no making-ofs, interviews, behind-the-scenes featurettes or video essays, with the only conventional extras here being commentaries for each film.
The Guardian‘s excellent Peter Bradshaw joins Nic Refn for the first film and, somewhat surprisingly for such an established name, comes off as a real fanboy, something not unenjoyable to experience. The second film gets a much more subdued – though equally casual – commentary with Catherine Shoard, also of The Guardian, with questions like, “Do you have any tattoos, Nic?” “Yeah, a couple [but] I didn’t get addicted to the pain.”
A more unconventional, though not unwelcome extra is a trilogy of roughly-equivalent films, sleazy Danish crime dramedies, only steeped in the fashions, music and filmmaking conventions of the 1960s. These pictures have nothing on the sorts of films that U. S. filmmakers were producing around the same time – don’t expect a lost Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider or Mean Streets. The experience is more akin to Russ Meyer films, the groovier end of 60s spy-fi, or Shōwa-era Godzilla, in terms of the period pleasures on offer.
Finally, there is the documentary Gambler. This was theatrically released, but it can easily be viewed as a Pusher II “making-of”. Unconventionally, it mostly eschews scenes from the actual filming of Pusher II, and focuses instead on the financial woe following Refn’s Fear X, and how – much to his girlfriend’s chagrin – he chose to dig himself further into debt financing Pusher II and III in the hope that they would allow him to repay those debts. Obviously, this worked out and then some, for Refn eventually moved to Hollywood to make films like Drive and The Neon Demon, and wouldn’t it be a depressing documentary had that not been the case? It’s a nice, though underwhelming, watch for Refn fans, but it is somewhat surprising that it was ever released as a standalone documentary at all. While it’s much in the vein of American Movie, that documentary is appealing without any prior knowledge or interest in its subject, and Gambler can’t boast the same thing. It is, however, neat that each of the Pusher films involve a person in debt to local crime bosses and attempting audacious moves to scrounge up the necessary debt before their time is up; Gambler posits the same scenario, with the film world replacing the crime world – even its title alludes to Pusher.