Câmp de maci

The film threatened to be one of those two-parters that quickly slide into boring irrelevance. All the elements were there, the closeted Romanian guy, his Kabylie boyfriend from France and a fleeting visit from a nosey sister who thought her brother was going through a "gay phase".

The two lovers are happy together but there are problems. Hadi wants to go out and about but closeted Cristi wants to keep their relationship, indeed Hadi's existence, under wraps. We are not aware of Cristi's job during the scenes in the flat where the two guys are staying so his reluctance to risk an outing (in both senses of the word) is difficult to understand. Even when the film moves unobtrusively to Cristi's work, we are not sure what it is as the shots showing him do not at first reveal his gendarme uniform.

The unit is going to a cinema whose showing of a film about lesbians has been disrupted by a load of nationalistic god-botherers. Although both the police and the gendarmes try to appear neutral on the surface, when they feel they are not being overheard they make hateful and homophobic statements, Cristi included.

One of the gay guys implies that he will reveal Cristi's orientation leading to a confrontation that is only solved by long negotiations with the cops.

This much is revealed in the storyline provided by IMDB so not a spoiler.

Cristi feels that this is a disaster and we watch his feeling of doomed terror for the rest of the film.

The cleverness of the film was to concentrate on the dynamic at work rather than that of the relationship. Relationship films have been done to death. However, films whose gay characters interact in a macho and illiberal environment such as the police or gendarmerie have not.

Conrad Mericoffer played a good role as Cristi, a man who senses that his life is spinning out of control. He well portrayed the increasing desperation of the character needing to know the results of the confrontation. He was convincing in the earlier, tender scenes with lover Hadi and just as real in his role as macho man conforming to canteen culture.

The film was a compact eighty minutes long and was just right. We are left with a final comment from his boss that might mean something or might not. Had all the cover up that Cristi had maintained over his life at work been rent away? We shall never know.

Cristi's foreign boyfriend has just dropped in, but Cristi has to go to work as a member of the Romanian "military" police. His team is called on to help with a situation where protestors have stopped the screening of a lesbian film. He hits one person who threatened to out him, and half the film is Cristi interacting with various other individual officers keeping him away from the main crowd and the complainant.

This is a portrait of the police force, its masculine-homophobic culture, and how Cristi adapts to it. However, I would like more action of some sort, rather than all the chatter. I was mildly irritated that the opening boyfriend segment of the film was basically used to establish that Cristi was gay, while the boyfriend's being a Muslim just seems to be an irrelevancy.

Somewhat interesting story of a gay police officer caught in a conflict during a police interaction with homophobic radicals in a gay movie theater. The conflict is that there is someone in the theater who knows this police officer & that he is gay & there is a minor altercation between the two. The rest of this very short film contains extremely vague, seemingly purposeful, one on one dialogue between various police officers ending with the most unusual, puzzling and, of course, vague line in the film. In all honesty, I am not at all sure what this is trying to say, but it is somewhat interesting contemplating it's possible various meanings. The acting is solid, but the title is also unclear.

If you expected a traditional drama from this film, you'll be a little lost at the beginning... I know I was.

Drama tends to be more concise - every scene and line is supposed to contribute to the arc of the story. But 'Poppy Field' is made to look more like a documentary, with rougher scene changes, spontaneous camera walks, and seemingly mundane lines that doesn't necessarily do much to the story... because there's no real story as such.

What the film does is patching and summing up the various moments of Cristi's day. And there we eventually get a sort of a pattern, a bigger picture, and inner turmoil that oozes out from the character against the given situation.

In that regard, it's well done. Actors and scenes are all realistic and believable. But in the end, probably because I haven't shed off my expectation from more traditional drama, I could not help but feel a bit 'so what?'. I just wanted it to be a bit more invested in Cristi as a person and get a little bit more comprehensive view of the LGBTQ situation in Romania... probably the very fact it left me hungry means the film was successful given its stylistic choice.

Maybe, the naked realism remains the basic virtue of this film . A form of realism defined first by language. I suppose, only a Romanian can understand, in real and proper manner, the entire pressure of situations, language, dialogue .

A jandarm and an intervention in a delicate case.

A presumed ex-boyfriend recognize him and having the foulish inspiration to remind to him the past. And the brutal, for me not exactly illegitimate, reaction of jandarm. The rest is the expectation of Cristi about the decision of his supperiors about the violence act of him.

At the final, you discover a courageous and deep honest film, different by many others offered by Romanians directors in the last decades.

Sure, the language is fruste, but it is not exactly a gay movie, an image of Jandarmeria or portrait of a man in difficult , stressed situation.

It is just the portrait, clear, precise of Romanian society. And this is the motif to appreciate it , like the impressive courage of director to propose a sort of mirror front to the viewer.

Presented in gentle manner. A group of men, a.