Men of Deeds, the new dark comedy from Romanian filmmaker Paul Negoescu, has a familiar structure. It follows a police officer in a small town who slowly uncovers deep, pervasive layers of corruption. Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and James Mangold’s Cop Land follow similar trajectories, right down to an unexpectedly violent climax. But anyone who has kept with Romanian New Wave must know that Negoescu’s film, co-written by Radu Romaniuc and Oana Tudor, has a unique sense of tone and pace. If the film lacks suspense or the thrill of discovery, that is deliberate because Men of Deeds is more about personality – and its influence on the culture of provincial life – than the traditional investigation you might find in most procedurals.
When we meet Ilie (Iulian Postelnicu), the chief of police of a small town near the Romanian/Moldovan border, he barely has any interest in his job. The idea of owning an orchard occupies his mind, to the point where he attempts to sell the apartment he co-owns with his ex-wife. Two unexpected developments shake him from his complacent, borderline irresponsible conduct. The first is the arrival of Vali (Anghel Damian), a junior officer who still has enough youthful idealism to take his job seriously. The second, more alarming development is a murder. Ilie has his own glacial way of running an investigation, one that mostly involves deference to the town’s Mayor (Vasile Muraru), whereas Vali would rather question potential witnesses. All this sends the town’s delicate peace into a tailspin, so that Ilie has no choice but to act.
Postelnicu’s performance – primarily in how he carries himself – is key to the film’s peculiar tension. It is not always clear whether Ilie is aware of what is happening under his nose, or whether he has learned to look the other way. Ilie also has sunken features, with sleepy eyes that somehow also convey unspoken anxieties he dares not articulate. Some scenes of the film depict Ilie like a country bumpkin, such as when the Mayor nakedly manipulates him or he speaks to out-of-towners who wandered into the village by mistake. At other times, he is angry and alert. In one of the more memorable scenes, he privately excoriates Vali with florid insults (unfortunately, the subtitles do not capture the peculiar, profane beauty of cursing in Romanian). The scene could be interpreted at the surface level, or a way for Ilie to protect Vali from a dangerous situation. A lot of interpretation is left to the viewer, creating a kind of excitement that only comes when a director trusts an audience enough to make up their own mind.
Like many other Romanian films such as Graduation, Negoescu’s deeper purpose is to consider how institutional rot infects the Romanian people. The characters in this film see corruption and bribery as part of the national fabric, and they have made peace with it along as day-to-day life unfolds without too many surprises. The murder throws this casual microcosm of totalitarianism into a tailspin: we learn the perpetrators of the murder early in the film, along with Ilie, while no one bothers to inform the victim’s widow Cristina (Crina Semciuc). Grieving and angry, she finds herself in bizarre situations where she must unknowingly help the wrong people or serve like a caregiver to men (always men) who handle the fallout from the death worse than she does. Negoescu suggests these serious men can get things done only because they have created a shared lie that everything is tranquil in the village. The mafia might be envious of the stranglehold that these men hold.
At first, the conclusion for Men of Deeds seems too tidy for this material. Frustrated and determined, Ilie finally confronts the institutional rot he has tolerated for too long. The confrontation ends with the kind of violence that melds the realistic with the surreal. None of the characters knows how to handle a hatchet, let alone an automatic rifle, and so they hurt/kill each other more by accident than on purpose (there is a bit of the Coen brothers to how the film handles gore). If this resolution seems sudden, then at least Negoescu has a black sense of comic surprise. But perhaps more importantly, the film juxtaposes that surprise with a sense of inevitability. Ilie is not a bad man, just a lazy one, and he was finally put into a situation where he could not tolerate any more self-loathing.
More than the serious men who run the town, Ilie (and Vali, to a lesser extent) are the true men of deeds because morality motivates them, rather than greed or lust. The film’s bitter irony, one that will be familiar to more than Romanian audiences, is that their noble efforts barely matter when their deep indifference is created an untenable situation in the first place.
Photo courtesy of Dekanalog
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