The Romanian New Wave continues its powerful surge in this police drama by director Corneliu Porumboui. The film tells the story of Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a policeman who has been tailing a young boy because of his use of hashish.
Porumboui knows exactly how he wants to tell his story. From the beginning, it is clear the film is comprised of not just long shots, but long moments - scenes that take up huge chunks of runtime. For example, in his first stakeout of the film, Cristi waits for the boy he is tailing to show up to his usual smoking spot. And, as is the reality of a police stakeout, Porumboui wants us to feel the boredom of time passing, just like Cristi.
That’s not to say the movie isn’t interesting. The deliberate use of long scenes draws us into Cristi’s world and that of police procedure, too. Rather than glamourising police work as most movies do, this film elects to show a more real, and often tedious, look at police work. Cristi’s police reports are handwritten and shown to us to be read in full as the camera slowly pans down over them.
However, it is when these long moments are brought into Cristi’s home life where they begin to feel unnecessary. A scene where Cristi returns home after a day at work shows us over several minutes how he eats his dinner. The tension just gained from seeing him on a stakeout all day has instantly dissipated and it takes a while to be drawn back in.
The dilemma of the story here is Cristi’s unwillingness to bring the boy in for smoking hashish even after having spent all this time on his case. Cristi feels it is a trivial matter and will ruin the boy’s life for no reason. Cristi’s moral attitude towards this is admirable, but ultimately complicates the reason why he has so vigilantly been tailing this kid in the first place. A slow-burn that offers a new take on the police genre but invests more in its stylistic approach than the good story it actually has.
Score: 55/100