Poppy Field

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.

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.

Loved the feel of this movie, the acting and the observational directing style. I felt for the lead character's complex life and it has a hopeful message ultimately. This film will travel to many festivals and be a hit I imagine and it is an important film too.

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.

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.