What genre of movie are we watching? This is one of the questions that the viewers of the film ‘Oameni de treabă‘ (the title in the English distribution is ‘Men of Deeds‘), made in 2022 by the director Paul Negoescu, which I saw during the Romanian Film Festival in Israel, initially scheduled for October 2023, are asked to answer. At some moments we have the feeling that we are watching a comedy, then a thriller, later a a drama of personal failure and permanently a political satire of the eternal Romanian unreality. It’s yet another demonstration of how relative the divisions in cinematic categories and genres are. A good movie is a good movie. The shelf on which film critics or historians place it is less important.
The story takes place in one of the most beautiful areas of Romania, in Bucovina, in a village at the border of Europe. ‘Oameni de treabă‘ has two main characters: a rooster who escapes to an uncertain freedom from a truck transporting poultry and a policeman named Ilie, a man in his 40s who has not really succeeded in life and who lives alone, dreaming of buying land for an orchard and remarrying, after his first marriage ended in divorce. He is the village policeman and the trusted man of the mayor Constantin, kind of as ‘godfather’ (as in the mafia), who controls almost everything that happens in the village, legal or especially illegal. A young police officer is assigned as his subordinate just when a crime happens in the village. The curiosity and probity of the young man, who begins to investigate the crime, risks disturbing the order that had kept the village relatively prosperous (compared to other surrounding villages) due to the fact that things were going ‘as always’. When the violence escalates, Ilie will be faced with the dilemma of continuing to accept submission and collaboration with the corrupt environment. But what is the limit of accepting compromises?
Iulian Postelnicu achieves an exceptional acting creation in ‘Oameni de treabă‘. Policeman Ilie belongs to that category of heroes that we don’t know exactly how to categorize – positive or negative? He is a kind of modern Pristanda, the policeman devoted to the mayor, obediently carrying out his orders, convinced to a point that this is the way things were always and will be forever. Always astounded by what happens to him, he tries to overcome the impasse in which his life was and knows that he can only do it by accepting compromises and deluding himself that everything is for the good and the tranquility of the community. And yet, when the injustices around him exceed the limit of violence, when people he knows and who depend on him and his position as a lawman are hurt, something happens. But the price of rebellion is huge, even for a man of the system. Another formidable performance is that of Vasile Muraru as the corrupt mayor, who reminded me of the late Ernest Maftei in several memorable roles. The combination of drama and comedy, thriller and satire works quite well, but what stays in the memory, and thanks to the actor for this, are the long close-ups of the hero’s moments of solitude and balance. Romanian viewers will recognize themes already covered by the Romanian films, related to the endemic corruption and the disintegration of rural society, but for me the personal dramas are the ones that impressed me the most. The ending is memorable and changes a lot in the perspective of what happened up until that point. I would have cut it a minute earlier. It would have been brilliant. (‘Let’s go fishing somewhere else.’)