THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER III: I'M THE ANGEL OF DEATH (2005)

Fans of the Pusher trilogy are especially fond of Milo (Zlatko Buric), the Copenhagen-based drug boss who hunted Frank (Kim Bodnia) in the first film and appeared briefly in the second installment (in a subplot involving secondary character "Kurt the Cunt").  In Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death, a much older-looking Milo takes center stage for his turn in the spotlight.  Of course, following suit with the treatment of the other antiheroes populating Nicolas Winding Refn's trilogy, the film catches up with Milo on a day where everything he touches falls apart.

As the film opens, Milo is attending a narcotics anonymous meeting.  When it's his turn to share, he glosses over his addiction, preferring to share his stress about plans for his daughter Milena's (Marinela Dekic) 25th birthday party.  After leaving the meeting, we see that Milo's still involved in the drug trade, although he's got a bit of a supply problem at the moment; a much younger set of traffickers are forcing him to accept their terms on a bad deal.  It's not long until the situation spirals out of his control, setting him up for both a relapse and an über-violent solution to his problems.

Refn is more in control of his craft here than in any other chapter in the trilogy.  Take, for instance, the moment where Milo's craving for junk returns; it's accompanied by the most frightening conveyance of addiction I've ever seen onscreen, telegraphed entirely by a sound cue and tight cutting.  Buric is frighteningly good as Milo here, affable at one moment, psychotic in the next.  It's his show and he makes the most of it, delivering a full-bodied portrait of the type of man it takes to succeed at a high level in the underground drug trade.

A warning: the film contains a level of gore in its third act that borders on the cutting-edge makeup and practical special effects that Tom Savini pioneered in 70s and 80s horror classics like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.  It's extremely repulsive but doesn't diminish the knockout performance by Buric one bit.  It only makes him more frightening.

Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 10th at 9pm & March 11th at 7pm.  The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands 
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X 
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive




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THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER II: WITH BLOOD ON MY HANDS (2004)

Arriving some eight years after Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn revisits the dour environs of Copenhagen for the second film in his trilogy, Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands.  For this installment, he picks up with Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen); the former best friend of Frank (our protagonist from the first film), just as he's being released from prison.

Looking quite a bit more dim than he did in Pusher (anyone who has seen that film knows the reason), Tonny heads straight to see his father, Smeden (Leif Sylvester), hoping to work for him in order to pay off an outstanding debt owed to a former cellmate.  His father's reception of him is, let's just say, less than ecstatic, but he begrudgingly allows him to take part in the family's car theft business.

Pusher II doesn't have Tonny actively dealing drugs like the other leads in the series, although he does help his friend Kurt (Kurt Nielsen) in an ill-advised deal with Milo (the great Zlatko Buric, revisiting his role from the first film).  There still is quite a lot of drug abuse in the film.  Tonny uses cocaine and other substances liberally throughout it, as do his friends and the mother of his infant son; a child that Tonny denies siring.

Exploiting those layers, Refn has his troubled character struggling against assuming a parental role at the same time that he's dealing with his own father's disapproval.  To further exacerbate his daddy issues, Tonny has a much younger stepbrother and a best friend that Smeden favors over him.

The nice thing about this trilogy of films is that you can drop in on any of them without needing to see the other films in the series.  Having said that, the manner in which the supporting characters of one film morph into the focus of a subsequent chapter only adds incentive to watch them in sequence.

But, if you can only catch one of the three, the second feature is the one to see.  Mikkelsen portrays Tonny here as an injured animal, woefully damaged but not beyond redemption, albeit redemption of a most compromised order.  In this second swing at setting a story in his version of Copenhagen, Refn aims to tell a far more nuanced and universally applicable narrative; the second time's absolutely the charm.

Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 9th at 9pm & March 10th at 7pm.  The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:  
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death 
 The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive


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THE FILMS OF NICOLAS WINDING REFN: PUSHER (1996)

Fifteen years before Nicholas Winding Refn thrilled audiences with the genre-inspired hit Drive, he kicked off his career with Pusher; the first entry in an eventual triptych focused on the misfortunes of street-level drug dealers in Copenhagen.  Looking at the Pusher trilogy now, it's possible to trace Refn's rapid advancement as he learned the tools of his trade, accumulating the distinctive flourishes (especially those based in lighting, cutting and camera placement) that characterize his work to this day.

In his first film, Refn relays the tale of Frank (Kim Bodnia), a bottom-rung dealer who owes money to Milo (Zlatko Buric), a local drug lord who's just as likely to call you his friend as he is to order his muscle to go to work on you.  Despite having delayed payment on a prior loan, Frank convinces Milo to front him a large amount of heroin, certain that he's on the verge of a lucrative sale to an old acquaintance from his prison days.  The police intervene before Frank can make the exchange, leaving him in the lurch--without the dope or the money--and hopelessly in debt to Milo.

Pusher is a gritty, downward spiral of a tale, captured in a visual style that reminds one of a television police procedural; Morten Søborg's handheld camerawork seems unafraid of swooping into dark corners where dark ambiance is sometimes favored over fine image detail.  This run-and-gun shooting strategy places Frank and his accomplice Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) in a dismal world filled with obstacles; the largest barrier to success being their own stupidity.

That last detail is worth hammering home: these are not the brightest or most likeable of characters, although Refn never foregrounds such judgments.  Frank and Tonny's conversations may reflect a post-Pulp Fiction, criminals-are-everyday-people-too aesthetic, but the dialogue never crackles with the confidence and panache displayed by Tarantino's iconic thugs.  It's not because Refn couldn't necessarily pen such dialogue but, rather, because his characters aren't intended to be read as closet intellectuals.  They're misogynistic, boorish and unpleasantly base fellows through and through.

Pusher is essentially a neo-noir where the set of circumstances visited upon Frank feel earned, rather than the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  After spending the first half of the film watching Frank make awful choices, there's a righteous thrill in seeing him being dealt the consequences.  The film tells the tale of one man's ruination.  And Refn invites us to smugly watch as Frank's life story goes south.

Pusher will screen at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on March 8 & 9th at 7pm.  The film is part of the retrospective series, Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn.

Related links:
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death  
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Fear X 
The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive 

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Portland International Film Festival preview day 8: UNCLE BOONMEE & IN A BETTER WORLD

The press screening at the Whitsell Auditorium was packed on Wednesday in anticipation of two of the more hyped up films at this year's installment of PIFF.  Susanne Bier's (After the Wedding, Brothers) newest picture, In a Better World, took the best foreign language film award at the Golden Globes and is nominated in the same category at this year's Academy Awards.  Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, besides winning the competition for the longest title in the PIFF schedule, is the first film from Thailand to receive the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Uncle Boonmee is the sort of film that will appeal strongly to a certain kind of filmgoer, while leaving the majority of viewers wondering why so much attention has been placed upon this curious Thai import.  One of the festival staff confessed that a passholder complained that he has had "a better time watching oil drip down a dipstick."  Having said that, Weerasethakul's film is among the best two or three films I've seen in the program thus far.  It's a movie that continues to clang around in your head days after you've seen it.  I'm already dying to see it again.

Weerasethakul keeps the narrative wide-open, blending everyday life and myth within a loose and experimental narrative that requires the audience to suss out much of the details for themselves.  Coming out of the film with a friend, we spoke about it in terms of lenses through which the film could be viewed, rather than the specifics of plot, ranging from the mindful juxtaposition of interior and exterior spaces to representations of time.  None of which goes anywhere near describing what the film looks or feels like to a first-time viewer. 
What to expect: long (VERY long) takes of natural jungle settings, vividly life-like sound design, supernatural events, unexpected movements away from the primary narrative with little to no conventional segue (ex: hey, suddenly there's a princess being carried through the jungle by her servants...um, ok, I'll just go with it), etc.

I really don't want to talk too much more about the film, as I'd encourage potential viewers to go into it with as little preconception as possible.  But here's just a very basic overview of the plot:
Boonmee is a man dying of kidney failure.  One evening while dining, the spirit of Huay, Boonmee's late wife, appears at the table.  While having a conversation with Huay's ghost, their long-missing son, Boonsong appears in a greatly transformed state.  There's talk of shadowy figures called "monkey ghosts" and interspecies (or is it supernatural) mating.  Oh, and later there's an awe-inspiring and befuddling sequence involving a princess and a catfish.  Yup...a catfish.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 16th at 8:45pm.  There is an additional screening at Cinemagic on Feb. 18th at 9pm.

In a Better World is exactly the type of film you expect to see programmed in festivals and featured at awards shows.  Examining nothing less than the human condition and the phenomenon of violence as it cycles through the culture, it sets its sights on extremely lofty (and hyper-dramatic) goals that, although traveled by many other filmmakers (yeah, I'm lookin' at you Alejandro González Iñárritu), it mostly ends up achieving.

Centering on two young boys, Christian and Elias, who have come under the attack of school bullies, the film exhibits how (yeah, I know...it's simplistic and obvious) violence begets more violence.  Parallel to the schoolyard squabbles, Elias' father, Anton, is bullied by a mechanic after Anton breaks up a fight between two kids at a playground.  Despite Anton's warnings that reprisals will only bring more trouble, Christian and Elias decide to teach Anton's bully a lesson, a decision that spirals out of control, as these things tend to do.

In a Better World plays at Cinemagic on Feb. 20th at 4:45pm.  There is an additional screening at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 21st at 7:15pm.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 7: AFTERSHOCK & A FAMILY

I entered into the Whitsell Auditorium for Tuesday's PIFF press screenings expecting to begin the day with a Chinese take on the Hollywood disaster film.  After all, this is certainly what the trailer for Aftershock would lead most people to believe:

In actuality, Xiaogang Feng's film is a dramatic feature that takes place almost entirely after the events of the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, which, according to the film, claimed the lives of over 240,000 people.  We're given entry to this tragedy via a set of fraternal twins and their mother, separated by the disaster.

The first fifteen minutes of the film, in which we meet this family and get to see the natural disaster unfold, shows a lot of promise.  But when the post-earthquake rescue is followed by the first of many narrative leaps into the future, things begin to unravel quickly and the movie loses focus.  From there, the film slowly devolves into one long slog where it becomes increasingly difficult to care much about any one member of the family, due mostly to the director's stubborn resistance to providing the audience with a central protagonist.  Aftershock is almost 2 1/2 hours long (it feels longer).   And it's very apparent where the story is headed almost from the moment the post-quake rescue effort is summed up (at about the 15 minute point).

I should mention that Aftershock is the biggest domestic box office success in the history of Chinese cinema.  Go figure.

Aftershock plays at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 13th at 7pm.  It screens again at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 14th at 7pm and one last time at the Whitsell Auditorium on Feb. 17th at 5:30pm.

Pernille Fischer Christensen's (Soap) newest film, A Family is a well sculpted piece of cinema concerned with the issues of duty, love and, you guessed it, family.  Ditte is the eldest daughter of Rikard, the proprietor of a bakery that's been in the family for three generations.  Rikard, whose health is failing him, needs an heir to the family business and looks to Ditte to assume that role.  Leading up to her father's request, Ditte's been offered an enviable position at a gallery in New York and, along with her boyfriend Peter, has made sacrifices in order to accept the job.

 

  

Audience members seeking a reprieve from the realities of life need not apply for a seat at this table, as what at first seems like a light chamber drama develops into a dark and mournful film.  However, the acting alone, especially from Jesper Christensen as Rikard and Lene Maria Christensen as Ditte, is worth enduring the expected Scandinavian heaviness.  Very highly recommended.

A Family plays at the Broadway Theater on Feb. 12th at 3:15pm and 8:45pm and again on Feb. 14th at 9pm.