The release of the Pusher trilogy in France was expected since the success of part one in Denmark, for which no sequel was planned at the time, in 1996.

Pusher was the first spontaneous film by a young director, Nicolas Winding Refn, aged 26, who was influenced more by the golden age of the American whodunnit and by horror films than by the great European filmmakers. Although a great success in Denmark (nearly 190,000 admissions), the film was only distributed commercially in Finland, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom. The filmmaker was then carried away by a desire to make less commercial films and produced Bleeder in 1999 (90,000 admissions in Denmark and also distributed in Norway and Sweden), then Fear X in 2003, whose relative failure encouraged him to make a sequel to his very first film. In debt due to this film, he then followed up Pusher producing, successively, Pusher 2 (2004) and Pusher 3 (2005).

Each part works separately, following with a hand-held camera a central character whose bad decisions plunge him into problems. But the homogeneity of the production, the space given to amateur actors, the importance accorded to the description of a social universe and the development of the director, whose style progresses, from one film to the next, to increased disillusion, gives meaning to the idea of trilogy.

The first Pusher film thus follows a small dealer who attempts a deal too big for him and finds himself in an inextricable situation, between the need to repay a Serbian trafficker and the temptation to run away with his girlfriend. Of course, he will make all the wrong choices. The second part adds the father-son duo to a similar scenario. Tonny, played by Mads Mikkelsen (a star in Denmark who was in The Green Butchers and Adam's Apples), leaves prison to discover that he has a son and, while feeling affection for the baby emerging, attempts to be loved by his own father, a gang leader who considers him above all else a loser. This filmmaker’s return to business was a success in Denmark (seen by 160,000 filmgoers) but was not followed by significant distribution abroad. Finally, Pusher 3 (seen by just 38,000 filmgoers in Denmark in 2005) provides the portrait of the end of the reign of the Serbian trafficker from the first film, the day of his daughter's birthday. Darker than the two previous films, this last part emphasises the place of foreign communities in a Danish capital which, in the three films, appears above all a playground for small-time gangsters operating in a parallel universe in which all moves, particularly the most invalid ones, are permitted.

The combined release of the three films with just one set of prints at UGC Ciné Cité les Halles was, certainly, still modest but its small success (4,548 filmgoers in one week in the middle of the summer and despite a limited number of screenings, from 1,916 admissions for the first part to 948 for the third one) shows once again the potential of European thrillers and gangster films. The results during recent years of the Belgian Eric van Looy’s The Alzheimer Case (De Zaak Alzheimer, 600,000 admissions in Belgium), the Austrian film Silentium by Wolfgang Murnberger (200,000 admissions in Austria), the French films The Beat that my Heart Skipped by Jacques Audiard (1 million admissions in France and 100,000 in the United Kingdom) and The Little Lieutenant by Xavier Beauvois (640,000 admissions in France, Europa Cinemas Label in Venice) or, more recently, Romanzo Criminale by Michele Placido (800,000 admissions in Italy and 360,000 in France) are a few examples of successful thrillers, which always fit in with the social reality of their country of origin. Furthermore, we could cite the success of several European horror films, particularly British ones, such as The Descent by Neil Marshall (600,000 admissions in the United Kingdom, 382,000 in France and 239,000 in Spain) and Creep by Christopher Smith (400,000 in the United Kingdom and 174,000 in France). These are all films which, not content with finding greater or lesser success at the cinema, are assured by their genre of a future on video.


Jean-Baptiste Selliez