Pusher

A+

Within its action-thriller genre, a small-budget masterpiece.

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Nicolas Winding Refn rated highly for Valhalla Rising and Drive; it was time to watch the Danish writer-director's first Pusher movie, his 1996 debut feature, an action-thriller about Copenhagen drug gangsters.

Within its genre, it's a small-budget masterpiece. It won no awards in Denmark other than a Best Supporting Actor accolade for Croatian-born Zlatko Buric (as Milo, the Yugoslav top drug dealer). Unfortunately for Refn, the competition that year included not only Lars von Trier's Oscar-nominated Breaking The Waves but another multi-award-winner, Jan Troell's Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow.

And that was also unfortunate for Kim Bodnia, a stage actor taking his first major screen role as stocky, tattooed Frankie, a middle-ranking dealer with an attitude problem and a girlfriend who's a whore keeping her heart of gold open for him. He has a loyal best friend too, Tonny, played with dazzling flair by then-young Mads (Casino Royale, After the Wedding, Clash of the Titans) Mikkelsen, sporting a bald head with the word Respect tattooed on it.

Day by captioned day, the docudrama-style plot and hand-held cameras follow the week of Frankie's progress from carefree contentment to imminent death, while deals are made, go wrong, and lead to gory deaths and mutilation. Refn's Copenhagen is a low-lit, shadowy city that feels as if it belongs in a black-and-white and very noir thriller.

Refn had no training (having abandoned film school after a month, when he gained the funds to transform his projected short into this feature), but his father was a Danish film director and his mother a cinematographer. Childhood environment probably counted for more than genes did, as with the offspring of many other entertainment industry professionals.

Intriguingly, Pusher was remade in 2010, with the same title, as a Hindi-language production set in the UK. Even more amazingly, it's now been re-made again in English as a low-budget British production due for release in 2012; its cast includes Buric reprising his role as Milo.

The finest flattery for the film came from Refn himself. After the failure of his Fear X English-language feature bankrupted his production company, Refn hurriedly wrote and directed two further Pusher drug-dealing thrillers to capitalise on his first film's commercial success. The first sequel (2004) focused on Tonny (Pusher 2: With Blood on my Hands), for which Mikkelsen collected a handful of Best Actor awards; the next (2005) on Milo (Pusher III: I'm The Angel of Death).

In a better world

The Danish film industry chose wisely when it picked its entry for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. In a Better World, directed magisterially by Susanne Bier, combines various elements from past award-winners: the juxta-positioning of European and African story lines, schoolboy alliances, bullying, marital stress and, as the original and much more informative title announced, revenge (Haevnen).

Its writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, provided the screenplay that won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for foreign film in 2011; it was his fourth collaboration with Bier. For its first hour, it was a visually stunning, emotionally gripping film tapestry, weaving its various story lines well.

Then, an over-loud over-emotive ecumenical chorale wailed, and there was one too many beautifully composed cinematographic postcard of African landscapes contrasted with similarly ravishing scenes from the Danish countryside. For the second hour, the movie's all-conquering power was lacking, its credibility sapped, every scene too craftily contrived.

The core story is that of two schoolboys, one a buck-toothed sweet-natured bullied son of a separated couple. His Swedish father is the director of a field hospital in Africa, probably Sudan, his Danish mother also a medical professional. A new boy at school, fiercely resentful of his mother's death from cancer, befriends the "rat-boy" and uses him as a means of revenge on the world and his distant businessman father.

In Africa, the doctor is obliged to provide treatment for a one-eyed warlord who (conveniently for the movie's morals) places bets on the sex of pregnant women's babies, and slices them open to find out the answer. Back in Denmark, visiting his two young sons, the doctor encounters xenophobic adult bullying from another dramatically convenient villainous character. On both continents, his high-minded decency is tested, and in Denmark he tries to teach the three boys the virtue of turning one's cheek and ignoring moronic behaviour. The alienated child prefers the idea of revenge, in words against his father and with knives and bombs against bullies.

Meanwhile, the mother unknowingly seeks some justice for her unfaithful husband, the widower cannot establish a relationship with his motherless son, and that angry boy sits often and ominously on the rooftop of a tall silo. All the characters end up happily, as they are supposed to in a better world, and the screenplay ignores the future lives of the Africans and the school bully. The movie is an above-average TV drama; moralistic soap operatics that look good and sound too pat, too formulaic to be convincing images of forgivable revenges.

Brotherhood

Is it possible to construct a credible gay romantic movie telling a tale of two young members of a National Socialist party branch experiencing same-sex attraction for each other? In 2009, Nicolo Donato, a Danish photographer and video/short film director, almost achieved the cinematic mission impossible with Brotherhood (Broderskab).

"Almost", because only devout romantics could believe that a long-time neo-Nazi skinhead with a strongly tattooed body might suddenly acknowledge his repressed tendency after a few beers, a skinny dip and a hot shower with his new slightly less repressed flatmate. It might be called the Brokeback Mountain syndrome, in which two lonely randy young men play games and find out they're serious.

As with Ang Lee's almost credible movie, much depends on the acting prowess of the two lead men. Donato's Danes are very believable even though their contradictory characters are not. Voluntarily, they do and say things in public that are both gratuitously evil or prejudiced, far from the level of human awareness they show each other. They take some anti-Muslim actions that the narrative doesn't show to be essential plot or character developments in terms of their personal standing or safety within the neo-Nazi brotherhood.

Three minor neo-Nazi characters are more credibly nuanced: a drug addict who betrays his older brother, a fat local party leader with charisma and cunning, and a patrician national party leader with political skills. At the end of the movie, the plot for its sequel was heavily signposted. It will probably be equally surprising: this director is worth watching.