police

End of Watch (2012)

André Crous

Cameras are everywhere in End of Watch, a gritty take on the genre of police drama set in the City of Angels.

end-of-watchUSA
4*

Director:
David Ayer
Screenwriter:
David Ayer
Director of Photography:
Roman Vasyanov

Running time: 110 minutes

It’s all about the cameras. In End of Watch, a Los Angeles cop and his partner (sometimes in crime) patrol the city’s south side and have a lot to deal with, and police officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) decides to start passing the time by filming what the force does and how they do it.

This gimmick is not narratively grounded in some search for the truth behind the deeds; rather, it is all about participation, and the viewer doesn’t simply look at the events through the eye of Taylor’s camera but through multiple eyes, including those of surveillance cameras and helicopters flying high above the city.

The opening scene is shot from inside a police car, from the point of view of the dashboard camera that captures a chase, suddenly made vivid when the scene abruptly transitions from voiceover to very real-world sounds of racing through the backroads of a lower-class neighbourhood in South Central. When Taylor and his partner, Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), eventually catch up with the speeding perps, there is a shootout that ends with the runaways being shot dead, violently, in broad daylight.

Luckily, director David Ayer had the good sense not to limit his camera style to pocket-sized handheld, though we do get an awful lot of that. There are some significant problems with his choice of style at certain points in the film, top among these the music-video motif he employs during mass shootouts, undercutting the viewer’s feeling of being present at the scene of a crime.

Given the nature of the plot – large parts are connected not by story but by the central duo of Gyllenhaal and Peña, whose banter is lively, engaging and seemingly heartfelt – End of Watch‘s dependence on style is notable. However, save for the moments highlighted above, the approach and the composition of the film by means of precision editing ensure that the viewer never loses interest.

The actors were essential in this process, and their easy delivery of the lines makes for a very real feeling of camaraderie between them, a feeling that the filmmaker certainly counted on with the final moments in mind: The title refers to the death of a policeman, the end of his or her time on the beat.

Most of the day, Taylor and Zavala are out on the streets, driving from one end of their sector to the other, and spending that time talking about seemingly insignificant things that all end up tying them together as friends and partners. Making jokes about each other’s race (Taylor is white, Zavala is Hispanic) and the stereotypes that go along with the colour of their skins, they also talk about things more personal in their own lives, though the discussions are mostly limited to talk of either wives or girlfriends.

These friendly talks are woven into the situational structure of the screenplay, in which they respond to calls for help and follow their instincts, sometimes with good intentions but often with results that only demonstrate the problems produced by their unwillingness to be patient and let the law work itself out.

At times, End of Watch can be incredibly tense – a direct outcome of the film’s visual style. When Taylor and Zavala arrive at an empty house, the camera doesn’t show us any more than what the characters themselves can see. There are no surveillance cameras to warn them of imminent danger, and their (our) view is often obstructed by walls, doors and stairwells.

The process of joining the viewer to the camera is gradual, almost imperceptible, but during one of the film’s final scenes, the impact of having the images in front of us suddenly turn to noise is beyond words, as we realize what bond we have formed with the visuals and how close we have come to the situation and the characters depicted onscreen.

The film offers a novel approach to telling the story of policemen on the job, and, though End of Watch never soars to the level of Paul Haggis’s Crash, a project that also featured Peña, it certainly conveys the grittiness of being a cop and the fact that danger can lurk behind any corner. This is not a story about good cops and bad cops but about human beings who have to face not only the poverty of those they need to protect but also the inhumanity brought about by drugs and violence in a neighbourhood where these are often the only forms of stability.

The Major (2013)

André Crous

In a tiny village in the Russian heartland, a desperate cop tries to fight the consequences of a terrible accident.

major-mayorRussia
4*

Director:
Yuri Bykov
Screenwriter:
Yuri Bykov
Director of Photography:
Kiri Klepalov

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Майор
Transliterated title: Mayor

On a desolate road in the Russian countryside, a man is driving like a bat out of hell. There are very few cars about, but he seems to pose a threat to himself every time he passes another vehicle on the highway.

He is called Sergey Soubolev (Denis Shvedov), and despite his reckless driving, he is his small town’s deputy chief of police. He has just received a phone call from the maternity ward in the next town, where his wife has gone into labour, and he is desperate to be there as quickly as possible.

But in his frenzy, he fails to notice the pedestrian crossing in time, and fearing the icy road would pose a greater threat to his safety if he slammed on the brakes, he heads for the ditch on the side of the road, but at exactly that moment, a small boy runs away from the oncoming car…  in the same direction. The 7-year-old Kolya doesn’t die immediately, but in his shock, Sergey throws the mother, Irina, into his car, locks her inside and phones his colleagues at the police station. In the meantime, the boy perishes in the snow.

What follows is a harrowing scene that we know will turn out badly for the grieving mother, whose fate is in the hands of the policemen who want to protect their friend Sergey, a colleague whose record is otherwise spotless and who gets along very well with the rest of the force.

Although not exactly an indictment of the corruption among the Russian police in the countryside, The Major is a fascinating study of power in the tiny setup that is the local police station, affected by the regional forces of the Internal Affairs Ministry, their reputation among the townsfolk and the ever-present criminal underworld that we notice on the margins. Sergey, the second-in-command at the station, wants to hold on to his job, but he has come this far without turning his back on his own moral values, and now that he is about to become a father, he is between a rock and a hard place: He wants to be in a position to provide for his family, but he also wants to atone for what he has done, and he doesn’t shy away from his guilt in Kolya’s death.

However, an admission that he was at fault, especially after the speedy cover-up his friends provided at the scene of the crime, would have disastrous consequences for the reputation of the police force, and everyone around him tries to convince him to coerce the mother into taking the blame for her son’s death. His friend Pasha (played by director Yuri Bykov), who at first seems to be helpful, becomes a force of violence in the film, who seeks to solve the ongoing crisis in the department with aggression, openly insulting and intimidating Irina and her husband, whose son’s body isn’t even cold yet.

In the second half of the film, Pasha, who obviously considers himself to be the keeper of the police force’s standing, takes centre stage as he uses his firearm as often as possible to obliterate the rolling avalanche of problems that originated with Sergey’s accident and the cover-up that he feels Sergey is not sufficiently grateful for. We see almost as many scenes with Pasha as with Sergey, and we get small clues about his character’s motivations that greatly enrich our impression of him.

There is a lot of bloodshed in the second half of the film, as events continue to spiral out of control, but the camera stays on top of everything, and a few characters deliver important snippets of dialogue that make us second-guess our thoughts on some key individuals.

Director of photography Kiri Klepalov supplies superb unbroken tracking shots, and two in particular stand out: The first occurs in a crowded hallway in the police station while there is a hostage situation one floor down and Sergey takes control of his men again, showing his skill at tactical solutions when he feels passionate about protecting his men; the second is seen a few short scenes later, when Sergey exits the police station, gets into a car, drives through the town to blocks of high-rise apartment buildings and exits one of them. The unbroken continuity of this second take and the continuous excitement and interest its content provokes are signs of a detailed directorial approach that should be commended.

One flaw is that the opening scene, in which Sergey gets the phone call about his wife at the hospital, seems to take a back seat for the entire duration of the film until it conveniently rears its head again to create a convenient bookend in the final scene.

Although action-packed, The Major, thanks to the director’s role as Pasha, the very likeable title character, Sergey, and a dynamic camera with some wonderful moves, rises above the level of a pure adrenaline ride. The individuals at the heart of the drama have some very understandable conflicts that provoke tension because a bona fide solution escapes us, too.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Police, Adjective (2009)

André Crous

Romania
3.5*

Director: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Screenwriter: 
Corneliu Porumboiu
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 min

Original title: Poliţist, Adjectiv

Cristi is a policeman, but he does not have the kind of life we have come to associate, through the American film industry, with the cop genre. He has been assigned to a case of teenage marijuana consumption, and by the looks of things, this is going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. The opening scene consists of Cristi following a teenage boy between his school and his home. Perhaps another film would have created some mystery about Cristi’s intentions – I’m thinking of the Dardennes brothers’ The Son (le Fils). But Cristi’s lack of self-consciousness indicates that he has probably done this kind of thing before and that he is very likely a policeman.

Our suspicions are confirmed in the following scene, at a meeting between him and one of his superiors. This is also one of the rare times that Cristi, whose face is generally expressionless, betrays any emotion. He has been following the teenage boy and his friends for a while, and he has dutifully written up and submitted his detailed reports, but he finds the mission rather senseless since no other country in Europe would prosecute anybody for smoking marijuana. He suggests they go after a friend, who might be a dealer, but his superior dismisses his suggestion.

The rest of the film contains many more scenes, often filmed in long takes, of Cristi tailing one of the schoolchildren. Sometimes he is lucky: They smoke something, and he gets to recover the butt, to determine whether it was tobacco or marijuana. But more often than not, he just makes a note of the vehicle registration number or a visitor’s times of arrival and departure.

As far as long takes are concerned, the film seems to have a Tarr-esque obsession with recording the passage of time, and in two scenes director Corneliu Porumboiu films actor Dragoş Bucur, who plays Cristi, eating alone at his small kitchen table. The one takes place in complete silence, the other is accompanied by the very bad music (“Nu te părăsesc iubire” by Mirabela Dauer) played on YouTube by Cristi’s wife, with whom he is clearly not very enamoured. And we are not much taken with her either, given her choice of song and her choice to repeat the song ad nauseam.

The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise about the use of language. It is, by no means, the kind of film one has in mind when thinking of a “police film”, which demonstrates the conventional use of “police” as an adjective, but which this film does not exemplify. So what? The scenes showing Cristi’s anxiety at challenging the status quo, namely his superiors, are infinitely more illuminating and constitute the only real points of dramatic interest in this film.