Beyond the Multiplex

Aug. 17, 2006 | Nicolas Winding Refn didn't set out to make a crime trilogy that would become an international sensation -- and, quite possibly, the basis for a forthcoming series on American cable TV. (He won't say what network, but it's probably either HBO or Showtime.) He did it for the money.

With the clock winding down on the languid days of late summer, this week brings us one of the oddest and most challenging releases of the season, Refn's "Pusher" trilogy, three violent, low-budget films shot on the streets of Copenhagen, Denmark, with hand-held cameras and actors recruited from that city's criminal underworld. That's right, Copenhagen. Instead of the tidy citadel of liberal tolerance and nanny-state social democracy, Refn gives us a nightmarish city of callous killers, drug deals gone wrong, Slovenian and Turkish crime bosses, and skanky hookers who dump babies on the floor at all-night parties where they snort coke till their sinuses bleed.

Refn's films -- "Pusher," made way back in 1996, "Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands" (2003), and "Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death" (2005) -- bear an obvious similarity to "The Sopranos" and similar third-wave TV crime dramas, which the 35-year-old Danish director doesn't deny. But the "Pusher" trilogy actually began before David Chase's series reached the air, and it has a specific history, a bloody-minded intensity, a formalist structure and a moral fervor that are very much its own. (At least at New York's Cinema Village, viewers will have the choice of watching the films separately or sitting through all three in succession on the same day.)

Refn, who was born in Denmark but spent his formative years in New York, is himself something of a cultural hybrid, almost a man without a country. "Pusher" was his first film, born of his teen addiction to the American crime movies he watched on TV or in the long-gone grind houses of pre-Disney-fied Times Square. "Nobody made films like that in Denmark," Refn tells me during an interview at the Manhattan office of Magnolia Pictures, his distributor. "It was something new, and it showed people over there that there was potential in that kind of material."

"Pusher" begins as a fairly standard '90s crime saga, almost an open imitation of Quentin Tarantino. We're following Frank (Kim Bodnia) and Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), a couple of lowlifes and screw-ups who are getting in deeper and deeper trouble with their employer, an avuncular Balkan immigrant named Milo (Zlatko Buric), who is one of the city's biggest drug dealers. But something happens on the way to the film's haunting and ambiguous conclusion: Frank gradually moves front and center, and the story becomes as much about his self-hatred and strangled emotional life as about whether he will survive these adventures.

"Even when I made the first film, when I was 24 years old," Refn says, "I realized that I wasn't interested in drugs or violence. I don't know anything about that. I don't drink and I don't smoke. I was interested in the vulnerability of the characters. That to me was where the real drama lay. The environment of crime and drugs was like a shell, and it was a question of what I put into that shell. I find people's vulnerability much more dangerous than their physical danger, their psychotic behavior, or the fact that they're high on drugs or whatever. Their vulnerability is actually much more frightening.

"I made 'Pusher,' to begin with, because I liked gangster films and I had seen a lot of gangster films. And I shot it in chronological order; I always do that: scene 1, scene 2, scene 3, scene 4. Halfway through that, I began to realize that I was more interested in the emotional lives of the characters, the morality tale. So 'Pusher' is like two different half-movies. Suddenly the film switches focus and becomes about the descent of this man who's incapable of showing his emotions. That takes over and becomes the driving force."

When "Pusher" was released, it made a modest splash in Denmark and went unnoticed elsewhere. Refn moved on to other projects, becoming one of those directors who hover on the fringes of the international film scene without finding the right opportunity. He made a semi-experimental film in Denmark called "Bleeder" that has some admirers but got the Danish actors union exercised over his alleged working conditions. ("It was quite silly," he has said of the episode. "They claimed I'd put actors through unnecessary psychological pain, but it was basically a union wanting to show they were worth something. It was insane, stupid ... but it didn't hurt me.") He came back to America in 2002 to direct John Turturro and Deborah Kara in "Fear X," a murky, moody "Memento"-esque mystery that critics either loved or hated, but that attracted almost no audience.

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