Jan. 17, 2013 - Issue #900: The ongoing musical evolution of Hannah Georgas
Pusher
Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) launched his career in 1996 with Pusher, tracking a harrowing week in the life of one Copenhagen dealer—this pusher gets pushed, harder and harder. The gritty little ins-and-outs of the drug business have since made the rounds in American TV's best series, The Wire (where Stringer Bell even takes a college business course), while the bestseller Freakonomics noted that many dealers, stuck near the base of a pyramid-like business and bringing in less than minimum wage, still live at home.Luis Prieto's London-set 2012 remake of Pusher slides us into the highs and lows of Frank (Richard Coyle), who freely samples his own product, cuts the coke with baby laxative to increase his profits and soon finds himself trapped between police and his debt-calling supplier (played with oily zeal by Zlatko Burić, also in the original). Sniffing its way into the seams of England's multiculti capital—nightclubs, parks, an outdoor market, an immigrant's clothing store, a sad old user's pet shop—the film's best at showing how the grungy, always hustling-and-bustling city can be a place of slowly uncoiling despair. Frank becomes a petty cash-collector and, suspicion growing as he can't get hold of a mule, beats up his best mate.
Frank looks more and more harried as his control unravels. The film's look slides between luridness and garishness, with neon-lit, dance-music-scored scenes straddling grungy reality and dreamy urban cool. Pusher can be too music-video kinetic and pretty at times—seemingly epitomized by Agyness Deyn, a model, as the girlfriend whom Frank's drifting away from (though, in this version's deftly different ending, we realize just how dead-end she feels). The dealer does turn to his mom here, a pathetic homecoming first framed by bars between son and parent.
As Frank nears bottom, searching for a way back in, but soon realizing his only hope is to get out of this prison-like city, this mix of pop and pulp (sonically throbbed by Marcus Marr, Meg Cottone and a remix of Austra's "The Beat and the Pulse") becomes a hyper-charged, buzzy take on the London night-scene—and one man slipping under it, for no-good.
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