“Trilogy” is such a pretentious word. Everything it carries and implies–magnitude, breadth, conceptual rigor-cum-excess, finality–presumes an abstract necessity that its proponents can rarely fulfill, let alone sustain. Did Ingmar Bergman really need to earmark three consecutive films–Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence–to get his and his viewers’ heads around the nature of faith? Why not four films, or 40 (as so much of Bergman’s canon could ultimately be construed)? Are we really supposed to confine Gus Van Sant’s mortality fixation to Gerry, Elephant and Last Days–the formal “Death Trilogy” that even MoMA officially recognized in 2005? A trilogy like The Godfather–the last film of which nobody but its studio wanted (and even then would barely pay for)–is even worse off, with its retarded prodigal sibling tottering behind it like Ted Kennedy in a neckbrace (or like Fredo Corleone in a tuxedo, for that matter).

Zlatko Buric stars as Milo, The Pusher Trilogy‘s drug kingpin in crisis (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)
So anyway, when I learned a couple of months ago that the Danish export The Pusher Trilogy was soon arriving in America (Friday at Cinema Village, to be specific), I winced. Nicolas Winding Refn’s five-hour-plus, decade-in-the-making, interweaving saga about drug dealers in Copenhagen, cast in part with real criminals(transgressive!) and name-dropping Hamlet in its press notes, Pushers I, II and III all but alienated me even before the first thundering credit sequence or heroin deal gone bad. I admit it: I was worried.
And I was wrong.
Raw, uneven and quite frequently astonishing, Refn’s films in fact make up a totally incidental trilogy: easy to categorize and market, conferring all the status that trilogies symbolize in arts and letters, yet eschewing a thematic whole in exchange for a sordid, continuous reality. That a half-dozen or so of Pusher‘s characters come and go between films inclines it not toward some finite, Godfather-style mythos, but rather a TV-style tableau. In other words, don’t think of it as a franchise–think of it as a parallel universe, and a visceral, compelling one at that.
And even a literally necessary one, to hear Refn tell it. In 2004, he was eight years removed from the original Pusher, which follows the grueling trail of drug dealer Frank (Kim Bodnia) as he sprints from bust to score to a particularly implosive transaction that puts him in the crosshairs of Serbian kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric). The film and its 24-year-old director earned international renown, but Refn’s subsequent films in Denmark and America–1999’s Bleeder and 2003’s Fear X, respectively (Refn called the East Village home for several years and actually co-wrote the latter film with Hubert Selby Jr.)–fared incrementally worse.
“Basically, I owed a million dollars and had to pay off the debt,” he told The Reeler during a visit last month to New York. One of his executive producers suggested a sequel to Pusher. “I was like, ‘How dare you even say something like that? Me? Going back to my original format? And I’d always vowed never to do another gangster film, and blah blah blah, and artists should not be dictated by greed. and money. You know, all those stupid things you believe in wehen you’re young. But it did get me thinking, because I was desperate. I really was. And I said, ‘Well, what if I were to do this? How can I make it a challenge more than a necessity? How can I challenge myself in this situation?’ And by that time–I’m a very big television junkie–I basically went back and saw the first one again, which I hadn’t seen in years, and I said, ‘What if I took this as a television concept? I have this familiar environment that I could redo that would work, and then I could do episodic stories about people’s lives.’ Like television, but keep everything the same familiar range and style. So I went back and said, ‘I’ll do II and III.’ That was basically my challenge.”

The potential for failure terrified Refn (right); flops were one thing, but impugning the legitmacy of his precocious debut was not a misstep he wanted to flirt with. “All these things were going though my head constantly,” he said. “But I think it probably made me a better filmmaker being in that situation, because film is also a commodity, and in order to survive for a long time, your films have to make money. You are a slave, and you have to buy your freedom. And if I could incorporate my artistic integrity, than I could have the best of both worlds. … It’s easy to make one or two films, but if you want to make them for the rest of your life, in the end, that’s what it’s about.”
Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, released in Denmark on Christmas Day, 2004, reintroduces viewers to Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen), a loose-lipped accomplice from the first film whom Frank nearly beat to death and who spends the second film wavering between post-prison inertia, absentee fatherhood and a mortal struggle with his own father, a crime boss who relishes in withholding the redemption Tonny craves. The film’s bleakness is brandished almost as a middle finger to expectations for another kinetic thriller in the first Pusher mold; Tonny sleepwalks through life with a pity-party languor, impelled to act out only when challenged by strung-out survivalists whose doomed fate he knows he shares.
But while the flat self-actualization of Tonny’s ordeal stifles Pusher II to often unbearable degrees (you try finding a remotely sympathetic character in that movie), the crisis facing the old kingpin Milo in Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death (2005) simmers and smolders through one of the best films I have seen this year. Struggling through the early stages of sobriety and overextended in preparations for his adult daughter Milena’s (Marinela Dekic) birthday, Milo finds himself snagged in a drug transaction overlapping generations (he does not know how to sell ecstasy) and ethnicities (he gets cheated by Albanians playing fast and loose with translations). His younger henchman literally don’t have the stomach for his quieter domestic ambitions, and the most gratifying gift he can give Milena is generous terms on her own fledgling narcotics enterprise.
Making matters worse is his own failed ecstasy deal, which requires calling in a climactic favor that has to be seen to be believed. “I think that’s what the films were headed for,” Refn told me. “This inevitable film about this man who’s about to lose his empire. And I think that part three is probably my favorite one, reason being it’s the most experimental and it is the most…” Refn halted. “It’s the one that just…”
He paused again, a little longer. “It doesn’t excuse itself,” he continued. “And I like things that are extreme. I also like that people have different opinions: Some like the first, some like the second, somebody hated this, somebody loved that, because that’s what art does. Art works when you can discuss. When everybody’s happy, how does that touch you? That’s also why my films have open endings: How can you end something you’re supposed to live with the rest of your life?”
Well, exactly. The Pusher Trilogy alternately has its endings going for and against it. The mysteries facing each character in their films’ final scenes transcend closure; by disallowing Frank, Tonny and Milo’s escapes, Refn disallows your own. It really is sublime episodic storytelling, and the films completely defy the expectation that three will, in fact, be enough. You leave wanting more–a lot more–if only because you know it’s there.
(Refn photo by Jeff Vespa / Wire Image)

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