On the evidence of notable recent films from Romania, the Mideast, and France, there is a universal tension -- along with inevitable collision and collusion -- between underclass and law enforcement around the world.
Police, Adjective (2009, MC-81) is by far the lightest assessment, might even be considered a deadpan comedy in the dry Romanian style, but still is devoted to habits of mind held over from the era of a police state. A young plainclothes detective is tailing a kid -- in what feels like real and suspended time -- ratted out by a friend with whom he shares his hash. His boss just wants to run a sting on the kid, but the cop doesn’t want to entrap him for a basically innocent activity. At work he is lectured on the implications of authoritarian language, while at home his wife instructs him in the meaning of pop songs and grammar edicts from the authorities. As with most of the currently celebrated wave of cinema from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s film requires patience until its implications emerge. This one didn’t click into place for me, as it did for many critics. I sort of get it, but did it have to be so slow and drab?
Slow was not the problem with the jostling Ajami (2010, MC-82). Co-written and directed by Israeli Arab Scandar Copti and Jew Yaron Shani, this film is named for an occupied neighborhood of Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv, and features a bustling cast of nonprofessional actors from both sides of the great divide, each forced to cross boundaries of one sort or another. Using the currently fashionable technique of telling seemingly unrelated stories in a jumble of puzzle pieces that all connect at the end, we meet an array of characters: a young Arab man trying to negotiate himself out of a family vendetta, a hard-nosed Israeli cop whose young conscriptee brother has disappeared, a Palestinian boy trying to earn money for his sick mother back in Gaza, a Muslim hipster with a Christian girlfriend who thinks he’s free to rise above his situation. The convoluted suspense plays pretty well, and the ultimate connections do not seem forced, but the real attraction here are the dynamic, close to the bone performances by people very much like those they are playing. Sum it up as Mideast neorealism, in the storytelling vein of Crash or Babel.
Even better at the lower depths clash of civilizations is A Prophet (2010, MC-90), Jacques Audiard’s accomplished follow up to Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped. Though set in a French prison, here the clash is between Muslims and Corsicans. Tahar Rahim is outstanding as the central character, a homeless, illiterate youth, just old enough to get thrown in adult prison after an altercation with police. The great feat of this performance is to maintain our sympathy for the character as he receives a post-graduate education in crime. Niels Arestrup is electrifying as the old Corsican boss who seems to run the prison, even most of the guards. He presents the youth with a choice, kill a fellow Muslim on command or be killed himself. In a truly horrifying sequence, the boy does what has to be done and becomes the Corsicans’ Arab flunky, but thereafter forms relationships with other Muslims that allow him to operate precariously between two worlds. Stylish and intense as a thriller, this film is an anti-Scarface that excels at character development and implicit social commentary, potent and punishing.
You may have noticed that I have stopped applying numerical grades to my reviews, trusting my rating to emerge from my comments on the film. For the record, I would evaluate these three in turn as: noted with esteem but reservations; solidly recommended; and emphatically recommended (if you can take it).
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