Far from being an atypical wager if the history of world cinema is taken into consideration, the crux of Andrei Cohn’s directorial intentions in Arrest lies in a formula that’s been used far too little in the films of the Romanian New Wave.

He employs a logistical minimalism, which implies purging the film of secondary and episodical characters, that goes hand-in-hand with restricting the space in which the narrative plays out. Although this type of formula sounds ideal for cinematographic industries that are rather precarious, it does call to mind some topical images from the areal of Hollywood films – of a Robert Redford stranded in the middle of the ocean (in J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost), of a Colin Farrel stuck in a phone booth (in Larry Cohen’s eponymous effort), or of a Jakob Cedergren isolated in a police office room (in Gustav Möller’s non-Hollywood Den skyldige / The Guilty). And, recently, in Romanian Cinema, of an Alex Calin secluded in an apartment in Bucharest, in Nicolae Constantin Tanase’s Cap si pajura / Head and tails.

Cohn’s approach is certainly an upgrade in comparison to Tanase’s attempt, if regarded from the vantage point of directorial meticulousness. Set in the days of the Romanian Socialist Republic, sometime in the mid-eighties, Arrest maps out the final days in the life of Dinu (Alexandru Papadopol), an architect who comes under suspicion for consuming subversive cultural products (such as Xeroxed banned books, Radio Free Europe transmissions, illicit VHS tapes) and is tortured to death by Vali (Iulian Postelnicu), a first-time torturer.

The film’s few initial sequences that don’t take place in a police prison cell quickly map the playing field onto which the drama unfolds. Vali’s seen attempting to reduce his own prison term with the prison authorities, which was handed down after he accidentally killed an elderly woman during an attempted robbery. The solution is handily offered by the warden – the petty criminal shall become a torturer and be rewarded with a smaller sentence. The opening scenes offer the only opportunity to see Vali in the same position that Dinu is seen throughout the film – sweaty and submissive, filled with anxiety, an unmoving target of a toxic masculinity that’s bent on ridicule and conflict. Cohn’s thesis is blunt – the communist state stands against its own citizens, prompting an every-man-for-himself response, albeit not without compromise. Vali’s bailout is represented by Dinu, who is also in the position of compromising himself in order to escape. The militiamen are counting on the architect to croak, dragging even more people after himself into the fray of terror.

Torturer-Vali appears as anything but common detainee-Vali: a seeming ruler of the prison cell and his victim, and undeterred by the officious tone that official militiamen were expected to adopt, he plainly informs the architect of his scheduled beatings. Alone, sharing a room with his oppressor, Dinu has no escape routes, other than returning to the state’s underwear-clad watchdog. And, soon enough, that’s what he does, letting himself swayed by Vali’s mind games. A kick in the stomach here, a compliment there. A beating so vicious that leaves him unconscious on one side, on the other, a hand that’s feeding him. Contrary to what one might expect, the prison cell doesn’t add to the narrative’s suffocating atmosphere, as Cohn and DOP Andrei Butică’s interplay with various shooting angles makes for one of the film’s strong points: its usage of spatiality. The constantly shifting point of view doesn’t, however, make the experience of incarceration any easier on the protagonists, as the space remains unmoving to the eyes of the prisoners. The angle interplay does however impose a more alert edit, at a speed that still doesn’t keep the pace of Hollywood-editing, which is an edulcoration of the viewing experience. Two hours of regarding a man that suffers physical and psychological degradation sounds like a radical challenge, especially when guilt is ascertained by a set of laws that no longer exist and, moreover, that have come under fire for the last three decades.

It is not the case of Arrest, even though Cohn is eager to add his vehement voice to the choir of anti-communist contesters. The lion’s share of the film’s comedic situations comes from the difference between the victim, an architect hailing from the comfort of the middle class, and the torturer, a thief that was born and raised in the lower class, and is still lingering there. At their funniest, these situations face off Dinu’s petit bourgeois uptightness and pleasantries with Vali’s brutish vulgarity. After he’s pummeled down, Dinu responds with formal pronouns, his small victories lying in his intellectualist jabs. After all, what’s a broken rib compared to the knowledge of whom Tristan Tzara was? Arrest tries to thrash the Ceaușescu regime without a second thought, and it’s quite possible that it manages to pull the feat off even better than it had expected to – to accuse the communist eighties of crimes against humanities isn’t unheard of (anymore), and negationists are hard to come across amongst lucid political commentators, as radical as they may be. But to clash two individuals hailing from different social classes and to set that clash smack in the middle of a communist dictatorship, based on an intention to level out said differences, while making sure that the two are separated by what is virtually a bottomless chasm, is an endeavor that is as tendentious as it is efficient. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Dinu’s character isn’t understriked by rough strokes, a bothersome representation that certainly pays no honours to any of the era’s intellectuals, dissident or not.

There’s another attempt of Cohn’s at play, this time unsuccessfully, meaning the narrative fragmentation of the prison torture experience – same taste, smaller portion. The spectators are spared of explicit violence, as temporal ellipses and other such subterfuges mask it – knock-outs are doled behind tables or beds, never in plain view. Truth be told, in the absence of a visible process of punishment which turns the audience into witnesses, the reflectors turn to shine the figure of Postelnicu, who delivers a tour de force of verbal aggression. But a couple of harsh words have never killed anyone, at least not on their own.

Still, a rollercoaster of blindsided pain wouldn’t have served Cohn’s mission well. Years and years of exposure to audiovisual representations of aggression, amounting to a bombardment across all channels, have all but desensitized the audience to a large gamut of violence, as using the empathy elicited by bruises and injuries has become a cheap device to hook your spectators. Isn’t all the make-up and editing just ephemeral artifacts to a spectator that is neutral, meaning one that lacks fully-formed opinions?

I don’t mean to say that cinema can’t pulverize gigantic concepts such as violence and death into little particles – it’s one of its main functions after all, both in fiction and documentary. But is there any use of Cohn’s film in this form, for those who mean to have an impression of, or, at least, to approach the experiences behind real-life criminal cases? Isn’t Cristi Puiu’s approach in Moartea domnului Lăzărescu / The Death of Mr. Lazarescu more honest and efficient, as the main aggravating circumstance to the ailing protagonist’s condition was time itself or, more specifically, its passage, as the audience could take in samples of this static time simultaneously with the dying pensioner? Or, with even more honestly in regards to its stated mission, isn’t Stan Brakhage’s experimental documentary approach in The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes preferable, wherein short, harrowingly close-up shots of autopsy procedures performed on several bodies are compiled into a half-hour-long montage sequence, which is more than enough time for the audience to get used to (i.e. objectify) the lifeless bodies that are being carried back and forth? The best methods always arrive from artists that prove to have a profound understanding of the cinematic medium and can use its specifics to maximise the audience’s experience. And in the case of Cohn, although he does put his signature on a solid piece of directing, is still from fat from being a grand artist.

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.