Director Showcase: Nicolas Winding Refn - Part One

I'm sure it's no surprise for most people reading my blog to hear that I absolutely LOVED the movie "Drive" from Nicolas Winding Refn. I was already familiar with a number of his movies by then, but more recently I've been making an effort to fill in the blanks. Below I give my views on each of his first 6 movies and in a few cases I'm reviewing those movies for the first time here.


Pusher (1996)
(My original review here)
(I also reviewed the remake)

Nicolas Winding Refn's first movie tells the story of a drug dealer who wants to make a big score that will set him up for life. However, when plans go awry he finds himself owing a huge amount of money to his regular drugs supplier Milo.



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Bleeder (1999)
(All new review!)

Winding Refn brings back a bunch of actors from "Pusher" for his next film. Kim Bodnia (who played Frank), Mads Mikkelsen (who played Frank's unreliable friend Tonny), Zlato Buric (who played the drug lord Milo) and Levino Jensen (who played Mike, a fellow drug dealer).

This time around Mads Mikkelsen plays Lenny, a quiet chap who works in a video rental shop. Zlato Buric plays Kitjo, Lenny's boss. Far from being the evil figure from "Pusher", this time around about the worst he gets up to is bragging about the extent of his video shop's pornography section (which might get pretty severely taboo, but it's all legal nonetheless). The only person who it seems might have criminal ties is Louis, played by Levino Jensen.



Louis seems to have ties to a nightclub/disco. We never see the inside of it, but we see an event occur in the doorway. Louis' sister Louise has recently become pregnant by her longstanding boyfriend Leo (played by Kim Bodnia). Leo doesn't seem particularly keen on the pregnancy and feels like the responsibility is limiting his life options. Over the course of the film Leo gets more and more creepy particularly after a particular event outside Louis' nightclub.

Louis and Leo are chatting with the bouncers and one of the bouncers is extremely racist. The bouncer insists that they should never let non-whites into the club because they will inevitably harass the girls. Others in the discussion are unwilling to challenge him on this. Unfortunately it's not long before he dismisses some non-white customers only to be warned that they are known to have criminal associations themselves. One of them quickly returns and shoots the bouncer. The other bouncer and some other staff including Louis quickly tackle the shooter, pull him inside the door to the club and beat and kick the hell out of him. All the while Leo has been pulled inside too and is clearly distressed by the incident.



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Fear X (2003)
(All new review!)

This was Winding Refn's attempt to break into the American market. John Turturro stars in the leading role and there's also an appearance from James Remar (Dexter's father on "Dexter").



As the film begins, John Turturro is a security guard whose wife was killed in the building where he works. Friends at work have been helping him to borrow the old security tapes and he watches them intensely each evening trying to find any clues as to who might have committed the murder. He's not getting much sleep as a result of this and his wife's death is clearly constantly on his mind.

But nothing is what it seems. Police interviewing him ask whether he and his wife were linked with some kind of cult. They seem to treat the bereaved husband with some degree of suspicion.



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Pusher 2 (2004) / Pusher 3 (2005)
(My original review of Pusher 2 here)
(My original review of Pusher 3 here)

After the first Pusher movie I was convinced that the character of Tonny, played by Mads Mikkelsen, could not possibly be coming back. However, here in the sequel he's now the main character. Tonny is somewhat humbled by his experiences since the first movie, but he's still not very bright and he still gets in trouble.



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Agatha Christie Marple: Nemesis (TV Movie 2007)
(All new review!)

Getting roped into doing one of a series of trashy murder-mystery tv movies was apparently a sobering experience for Winding Refn. There was no option for him to do long drawn out atmospheric shots here. He had a script, he had a cast and he had to put it together, presumably in a pretty limited amount of time. There are some points where the camera rotates carefully around the actors, sometimes in quite a clever way, but that's about the limits of creativity here. There's very little in the way this is filmed that would make you guess Nicolas Winding Refn was directing.

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