‘Men of Deeds’ Review: A Rural Cop Sinks Into a Typically Romanian Moral Quagmire in a Grimly Dark Comedy
16.08.2022 - 10:31
/ variety.com
Guy Lodge Film CriticHaving failed to cut it in the city, mild-mannered Romanian cop Ilie takes a lower-pressure job as a police chief in a rural village near the Moldovan border. Expecting a quieter, easier life of mostly benign duties, he instead encounters even more violence and moral rot than he did before.
That he’s surprised suggests Ilie (played by Iulian Postelnicu with a permanent woebegone grimace) hasn’t spent much time watching his own country’s cinema. An exceedingly mordant comedy that gradually bleeds out to tragedy, Paul Negoescu’s “Men of Deeds” is another Romanian exercise in finding personal and institutional corruption under every upturned stone, behind every unlocked small-town door, in every heavily conditional handshake.
Audiences won’t be nearly as startled, but it’s bleakly compelling all the same. Back in 2016, Negoescu scored a major homegrown hit in Romania with his jaunty, shambolic crowdpleaser “Two Lottery Tickets,” a buddy comedy built on a familiar premise — luckless men buy and lose a ticket to millions — that could have been spun more glumly.
That film may have taken nearly five years to reach screens in the U.S., but nonetheless proved the broader appeal of Negoescu’s filmmaking relative to many of his more festival-laureled compatriots, alleviating New Wave austerity with more knockabout-style humor. After his 2018 romcom “The Story of a Summer Lover” failed to have the same impact domestically or abroad, Negoescu’s latest returns him to the comic territory of men adrift in a system stacked against them, though its harsher, ultimately feel-bad sensibility might make this Sarajevo competition premiere a tougher sell.In the film’s opening shot, a single chicken escapes its crate on a
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