If there are two shots that you want to really consider in a film, it’s the first and last shot. The first usually informs what the text is about, and likely contains some sort of symbolic meaning for the larger whole. The last shot usually closes the loop. The opening shot of Paul Negosecu’s Men of Deeds is of a truck ferrying chickens along a highway. One of the chickens falls out of the bed after the truck hits a speed bump. In doing so, Negosecu sets up the film as being a text about how the bumps of society leave some behind.

In Men of Deeds, the chicken left behind is Ille (Iulian Postelnicu), a small-town police chief. Ille can hardly be considered a success. He’s in his mid-thirties. His family life has fallen apart. His entire motivation seems to centre around building an orchard in the countryside for himself. There’s something pastoral about the whole endeavour; maybe, just maybe, this will make him a man.

Ille’s incapacity to see what is around him works on a narrative and thematic level. I love when the larger structure of films is crucial to understanding the film itself. There’s a scene where Ille is chastising the son of a widow by providing stereotypical, “man of the house now” truisms. He calls it foundational; societally speaking, it probably is. But it’s clear that Ille failed at maintaining that foundation throughout his life, which makes the repetition of such a comment crucial to understanding his character. Really, he’s just trying to convince himself to stay with the other chickens, that the path is still the path. Meanwhile, the widow and the local church authorities proceed to have a violent screaming match outside, which reaches such a fever pitch it begins to drown out Ille’s sermonizing.

It’s a wonderful sequence, and one that is impressively subtle in its construction. Its implications suggest that Ille is blind to the actual machinations of what is around him. It’s also a sequence that will be difficult to pick up on, and may potentially even alienate its audience. There’s a fine tightrope that procedurals which choose to display the incompetence of their lead must walk. Usually, we see this in character dramas that masquerade as procedurals, not unlike, say, Arthur Penn’s Night Moves.

There’s a similarity in how blind Ille and Harry Mosbey both are. The latter famously likens the cinema of Eric Rohmer to “watching paint dry,” which suggests a fascinating conundrum. To watch paint dry is to watch imperceptible changes. To hate watch paint dry is to despise the lack of perceptible changes. There’s a difference, and Mosbey’s clear alignment with the latter acts a damning piece of foreshadowing regarding the fact that he cannot see past his own nose to the philandering of his own wife. It’s a beautifully designed sequence inside of a beautiful film.

But also, I’ve been in undergraduate film classes where the discussion derailed itself into a forum to complain about Harry Mosbey. I love Night Moves; my classmates did not. It doesn’t exactly strike confidence in me regarding the potential effectiveness of Men of Deeds on a larger audience. I imagine that the film will be a touch frustrating to some, because I find the film frustrating at times too. Probably, this is a result of the various cinematic traditions at play. It’s not exactly a fair fight.

Penn is working inside of a tradition that places emphasis on action. On the other hand, Negosecu’s contemporaries are all of the slower variety. Right now, nobody (save maybe Lav Diaz) is doing slow cinema like the Romanians have been for the past decade or so. We’re fifteen plus years removed at this point from Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Men of Deeds is similar in a number of ways. The film clearly aims for a realism that a Hollywood film would eschew.

In some ways, this hurts the film. The central mystery is paradoxically simple and complex. Moments that should probably be bigger are muted. Reveals take a backseat to Ille’s character development. It’s also hard to envision the film being done in a different style. For all of my qualms about pacing and focus, Men of Deeds is quite subtle and works very well. I’m excited for what Negosecu does next, if only because I think a tighter focus would make those subtle moments hit harder.