Misery Breeds Corruption: Paul Negoescu's Men of Deeds
A chicken crosses the road – it's none of your business to ask why. Thus opens Paul Negoescu's Men of Deeds (2023), a tale of dubious morality and small town politics as filtered through a darkly comedic sensibility. Ilie (Iulian Postelnicu) is the sort of man who wears his misery openly on his face. In the wake of losing his previous job and marriage, he took a job as the police chief of a sleepy Romanian village in an attempt to maintain some stability. Ilie dreams of owning his own orchard, a bitter-sweet hope in lieu of the family he never achieved. He’s encouraged by the local mayor Constantion (Vasile Muraru), who dangles the deed to an abandoned orchard in front of Ilie's eyes – the longer he focuses on the orchard, the more he ignores the details of the shady dealings that go on around town.
Everything seems to be going along blandly when the appearance of a young police recruit named Vali (Anghel Damian) unexpectedly shakes things up. He’s come from the city in search of "a challenge," something Ilie not only dismisses outright but ruthlessly mocks him for. But Vali's visions of rural violence ends up ringing true when, just a few days later, a dead body appears in a ditch – a man with his skull split by an axe. Ilie orders Vali to stand down, they’re police officers not investigators, but Vali's desire to prove his worth leads him to openly disobeying orders as he attempts to interview townsfolk. This meddling begins to stir up trouble for the both of them when Constantion and his bruiser of a priest, Edi (Daniel Busuioc), show up on Ilie’s doorstep and confess to the killing.
They explain that the murder was just "an accident," with Constantion expressing his regret and asking Ilie to arrest him if he must. Shocked and unsure of what to do, Ilie hesitates – if it was truly an accident then there would be no need for an arrest, he reasons outloud. Besides, a scandal this big would disrupt the entire town. Constantion leads Ilie through this logic gently, all the while casually mentioning that after this whole situation clears up, he could let Ilie have that orchard for half the price – but don’t get the wrong idea, of course. After Ilie allows them leave, he feels uneasy but mostly relieved to no have to make any difficult decisions. Yet after an odd encounter with the two of them in the front yard of the dead man’s rightly paranoid wife, something starts to shift in Ilie’s perception. His certainty only just starts to erode when another bloodied body shows up – somebody he never expected.
Men of Deeds undermines expectations at every turn, from its wry humor to its surprisingly bloody finale. The film thrives in the sort of darkly comedic plane that’s reminiscent of the Coen Brothers or Milos Forman, juxaposing its characters’ selfish intentions against their unintentional admissions. The way the local police chief masks his insecurity as an authority with overcompensating sarcasm, or the bruiser thug of a priest crosses his heart with one hand and drinks liquor with the other. Even just how it focuses on peculiar details like loose chickens in odd places, janky wire latches on fences, or the way a local fisherman’s car can’t do a three-point turn without someone pushing it forward from the passenger side door. It never allows its characters to fall into simplistic stereotypes, instead imbuing them with a precise level of idiosyncratic detail to truly bring the story and its provincial setting to life.
Director Paul Negoescu draws out Ilie’s defeatism through closely inspecting every line of actor Iulian Postelnicu’s face – highlighting his milquetoast smile or the curve of his slumped shoulders as he slouches around town. Postelnicu’s performance snaps from timid agreement to self-righteous indignation, deftly carrying the film from genuine emotional climax to ironic, uncomfortable laughter. In one stand out scene, Ilie laments to his brother through choked back tears that without the ability to purchase this orchard he has nothing to live for; “I’m human too… I want to be greeted when I get home, to scare the sharks away for a child” he says, referencing his jealously of his brother having children to put to bed at night. Postelnicu truly taps into Ilie’s deep insecurity over what he thinks society expects of him – an issue that won’t feel too foreign to most modern audiences in the age of ever present social media.
The brilliance of Men of Deeds is in how it inverts expectations by turning the mystery away from a standard whodunit onto its own main character’s motivations. While Ilie’s loneliness is deeply empathetic, he is more of an antihero than he initially seems. So focused on his own selfish desires, he comes across as borderline incompetent, rarely noticing the full scope of what’s going on around him. When Ilie overhears the young Vali dismiss him privately as “a narrow-minded redneck that can’t see beyond his limitations” it’s not unreasonable to see why he’d draw that conclusion. But once Ilie confronts him with these words, he reminds Vali, and in turn the audience, that what looks like inaction to him is in fact actual police protocol. As far as Ilie’s concerned there’s no blame on his shoulders – the incompetence isn’t his, it’s the government’s.
There’s a thoughtful commentary here on how misery breeds corruption. Ilie’s lack of morality is less to do with his desire to proliferate crime as much as it is a product of his all consuming unhappiness. So distracted by his perceived personal failures, he allows everything around him to unravel until the problems of the town starts to overlap with his own. Ilie never truly has a big epiphany about doing the “right” thing, as much as he just realizes that by allowing violence to go unchecked he narrows his opportunities to achieve happiness. In that way, beyond corrupt politicians and thugs, loneliness is the true evil in Men of Deeds. Like poverty, it’s the ever present cloud that keeps the majority distracted while others run amok. By obscuring our ability to care for those around us, we find our own fates are tragically sealed.
MEN OF DEEDS opens in New York City August 4th, and Los Angeles on August 11th
