The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 15-21
Pusher (1996)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
This epitome of grungy 90s Eurochic has at its center small-time bullshitters who resemble early-Scorsese hoods, just in a different milieu—a Copenhagen underground so drab it’s practically Soviet. They riff on their sexual conquests and sexual aspirations; they get slapped by women in nightclubs; they get fucked up and fuck up. It’s the kind of stuff Miramax used to pump into the Angelika like Fruitopia, a world-cinema time capsule (featuring lots of trailing camera movement, giving it a documentary quality) and a look at the director Refn would become. Now he’s the ultimate stylist, the mannered prince of precision—entire plots expressed in Ryan Gosling’s eyes, primary colors richer than they appear in nature. There’re detectable traces of that director here, especially in the bold uses of red and blue, but it feels more youthful, with a loosey-goosey lack of rigor, an obviously small budget and the soft focus of 16mm. It’s conspicuously a first film—an aesthetic in progress.
Kim Bodnia, troublingly world-weary for his age, plays a dealer who loses a stash during a police chase and can’t make it up to the man to whom it belonged. (Bodnia’s best friend is played by a skuzzy and hyper Mads Mikkelsen, the DeNiro to Bodnia’s Keitel.) Beneath the genre cool there’s real feeling: the hurt feelings of the sex-worker love interest (Laura Drasbæk); the muscle (Slavko Labović) who wants to get out of crime and into shish-kebobs; and the lily-livered addict (Thomas Bo Larsen), pressured to pay up in a wrenching scene that ends hideously. Winding turns it all into tragedy, the Kafkaesque qualities of the drug trade, the sufferings of an unlucky man whose comeuppance is his meanness: you sympathize when Bodnia says he didn’t do anything wrong, but then you think about how he’s treated his friends and wonder if it’s karma. Henry Stewart (June 17, 1:25pm; June 20, 6pm at the IFC Center’s Nordic Noir series)