Poppy Field

Poppy Field ⭐️⭐️

Director: Eugen Jebeleanu. Cast: Conrad Mericoffer, Alexandru Potocean, Radouan Leflahi 

A potentially interesting idea gets wasted in a film that loses its way and forgets what should have been about more than once.

The story is inspired by a series of protests in a Rumania and particularly one in a bucharest cinema where a screening of a high profile lesbian film  got essentially highjacked by a group of religious protesters. The film re-imagines the event placing a closeted policeman at the centre of the story, having to control the situation on one hand while at the same time dealing with his own ghosts. 

The whole situation get trickier when one of the people in the cinema recognises the policeman as one of his past lovers.

With the backdrop of one of the most backwards country when it comes to recognising and accepting LGBT’s communities, this could have been a a really interesting story. 

Instead the director seems to run out of steam and ideas in a film that’s already pretty short. His insistence to film everything on long continuous takes while on one hand makes the sequence when we first meet the protesters very real, on the other hand doesn’t allow the the editor to pace it or to control its dialogue, hence we are left with very long extraneous sequences (like one when 2 policemen are talking about a dog being abandoned) and the film loses its focus. 

Instead the director seems to run out of steam and ideas in a film that’s already pretty short. His insistence to film everything on long continuous takes while on one hand makes the sequence when we first meet the protesters very real, on the other hand doesn’t allow the the editor to pace the film or to control its dialogue, hence we are left with very long extraneous sequences (like one when 2 policemen are talking about a dog being abandoned) and the film loses its focus. 

Not a complete waste: some good performances and sporadic goo moments but I think the fact that such film comes out of Romania is more interesting than the film itself.

Screened at the BFI Flare Festival.