Polisse (Monday, May 28, 2012) (50)

Movies and TV shows about cops make it clear that police work is really hard. Totally unrelated to that is the fact that kids are really cute. If you could somehow combine these two elements (kids and cops) you'd have a movie about how hard it is for cops to help kids (particularly those who are being molested and raped). Well, there is such a movie and it's writer/director/actress Maiwenn's Polisse.

This cinema-verité-style look into the Parisian police's Child Protection Unit (that also deals with the white slavery part of Vice) feels very much like a number of cop shows we've seen for years on TV (Homocide, The Wire, the "law" part of Law & Order) and doesn't have any more through-line plot than six episodes of any of those shows strung together one after the other.

The structure of the film basically has a child or parent visit the police station to introduce a case and meet with some members of the CPU team (there are about eight officers in the unit, a very diverse group of men and women). We then see how the team takes down the perpetrator or organization that's doing whatever it's doing to the innocents. Each of these sequences ends with the group of cops going out to blow off steam as a group, in bars and clubs or at the homes of one another.

They each battle small demons of their own (one is anorexic, one is getting a divorce, one is already divorced, although she regrets it, two are interested in dating, despite the fact that one of them is pregnant with her husband's baby) and seem to take the interactions with the kids very personally and hard. Maiwenn herself plays a photojournalist who is documenting the team for an art project... and trying to stay objective as she falls in love with one of the cops.

There are some wonderful moments of comedy (dark comedy, but funny) and tragedy, supported by some really wonderful acting. Karin Viard plays Nadine, one of the senior members of the team, is particularly good, although she's helped by her character being the most deeply developed. Frederic Pierrot plays Baloo, the leader of the group, and does it beautifully. Still, the film feels much more like a list of situations than a single particular story. There no connection from one episode to the next and kids who we get to know briefly and seemingly deeply vanish once their situation is solved.

Clearly this is a commentary on cinematic plot structure and a way of getting the audience to identify more with the cops. Maiwenn is specifically putting us in the position of the cops who can't totally remain connected to any individual kid because they will be gone soon and a new case will come up. The main problem with this is the the cops do seem to connect deeply to the kids, forcing us to connect in a rather forced situational way. Kids being cute make us immediately love them -- they're total proxy emotion devices. That the cops in the film connect to them is not really the same thing as when we connect to them. In principle they're connecting to the human being, while we're connecting to the idea of a "kid in trouble". This dissimilarity in our relationships to the children only goes to shed light on a major flaw in the film.

I am predisposed to hate movies about "kids in trouble" because they're cheap and emotionally insincere. This, however, is a good movie with some great stuff in it. I wish it had more structure to help guide our connections and feelings in a more purposeful way. What we get is really just a substitute for deep relationships that makes everything annoyingly superficial.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Rampart (2011) (Sunday, February 12, 2012) (153)

Rampart is Oren Moverman's sophomore film, and as with many second efforts, it's a bit of a mess. Well, really, it's a lot of a mess. It takes place in 1999 in Los Angeles where a super cop, David Brown (Woody Harrelson), has made a bad name for himself in his precinct, the Rampart Division near Downtown. He has a reputation as a badass for allegedly killing a man who was a serial date rapist ten years earlier. He lives in the garage behind the house of his ex-wives who are sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) and has a hard time connecting to his two daughters (one by each wife). He seems to be a sex addict and a drunk incapable of getting his life together and walking a straight line.

At some point he is videotaped beating a man after a short chase and his career is threatened. He then gets into more shit when he gets into another altercation. Just when it seems his situation can't get worse, as he's being investigated by internal affairs agent Ice Cube, he begins an affair with the ex-lawyer of the man he is accused of killing years ago.

The script, co-written by Moverman and James Ellroy (he knows LA cop stuff, right?!), is a total mess. I can't easily summarize what happens in the film because its direction changes three times in the second act. At some point it seems like a Bad Lieutenant-type melodrama, at others it seems like a ripped-from-the-headlines Rodney King-style story, at other times like a Leaving Las Vegas-style tale of entropy. There are about a dozen characters with a decent amount of screen time who are ultimately totally unnecessary to the film (including former Harrelson's co-star from Moverman's last film Ben Foster, playing a homeless veteran who has something to do with giving info as a narc).

I feel like there are enough good things in this film that if it had been rewritten and recut it could be a good film (take out 30 minutes and it would be an interesting and small piece). In its current form, however, it is a messy and overflowing heap of stories that don't really connect or lead anywhere interesting.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Friday, January 6, 2012) (1)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time In Anatolia has almost no action in it, and yet is is one of the best policiers I've seen in a long time. The film opens in a small police car as five men drive around the Turkish countryside looking for a particular, but hard-to-find location. It seems the man in the middle of the back seat has admitted to murdering a man and dumping his body. The cops in this car, and two other cars in a caravan, are out looking for that location, along with the prosecutor and a doctor who is there to give medical evidence at the scene of the crime. Because the murder occurred at night, the man has difficulty knowing exactly where the body is now.

Considering they are driving around at night in the first half of the film, it is shot mostly in extreme chiaroscuro, with the dark black outside interrupted only by the moonlight reflected on the men's faces and the occasional headlights in wide landscape shots. The roads they drive weave around the rolling hills of Anatolia, generally directionless, and the murderer tries to recall where the act was committed, possibly near a natural spring, possibly near a tree, maybe with a bridge nearby and a wide farmer's field.

This is wonderful and pure Becketian existentialism as the film moves along slowly and carefully. The men have several seemingly insignificant conversations that all seem to reveal nothing. It's an immersive experience to be with them, bewildering in it's solemn pace and tone. One scene drips slowly into another. First they go to one possible location, then they go to another, then the murderer thinks he finally remember something and they go to another location, but that's not it either. We keep getting stuck in mundane and ridiculous arguments about exactly what town a certain field is in, and whether that town's line is on one side of a tree or another. It's all beautiful and rather absurdist (as we're supposed to be investigating a murder).

This film is probably the most Romanian New Wave film I've ever seen that is not a Romanian film. The long, long scenes with nothing happening are very reminiscent of Corneliu Porumboiu's brilliant Police, Adjective. Certainly the mix of existentialist non-action combined with arch bureaucratic formalism is something both these films share. Like the Porumboiu, the second half of this film brings out the absurdity of paperwork, situational malaise and the sadness connected to the browns and beiges of officialdom.

The acting throughout the film is amazing, particularly the three leads, Muhammet Uzuner (who plays the doctor), Yilmaz Erdogan (who plays the police commissioner) and Taner Birsel (who plays the prosecutor). They are totally natural and honest, a bit arch and silly at the proper moment, though straight in a way that helps to underline their winking.

The whole experience of watching this film is very interesting on a meta level, I think. It's 150 minutes long and almost nothing happens, yet it's almost always totally gripping. It's the lack of action, the attention you feel you must pay at every moment that keeps you glued to the screen (not unlike Chantal Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the formal antecedent to the Romanian New Wave).

There are small beautiful things dotted throughout the film that show that Ceylan is a brilliant director. At one moment when the caravan is driving along the country, we see the lighted windows of a train passing in the distance. Immediately we consider that for people on that train, this caravan of several cars probably looks much the same to them. There is an elegance and a minimalism to the concept that the first half of the film is shot in near darkness, while the second half takes place the following morning, in bright light. There are several more of these dualities: rural and city, nature and buildings, rich and poor (between the doctor and the functionaries), Turkish and ethnic (it seems the murderer is an ethnic minority, possibly Kurdish).

This is a long movie, but a gorgeous one. At this point in the year it is silly to suggest it's going to be my favorite film of 2012, but I can't imagine there will be many other films that I like this much. It has a beautiful script, fantastic acting and looks amazing.

Stars: 4 of 4