Since the ultimate surge of global ire against law enforcement in 2020, depictions of police officers and their policing in film have inspired greater critique amongst audiences, whom for many and for the first time, are cognizant of the systemic politics construed in the media they regularly intake. Films and shows like Spike Lee's BlackKklansman (2018) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine evoked discussions on the ethics and role of portraying a line of work with a deeply problematic history and corruptive nature. I am personally of the belief that every artistic work, deliberately intended or not, is subject to politicization, for it is politics that binds together our ability to engage with every issue and topic under the sun. Within attempting to understand the various facets of police work and how different filmmakers choose to frame them through infinite narrative and aesthetic strata, what is ironically seldom seen, is the unmediated and unfiltered procedure of actual laboring in law enforcement as a working class predicament adjacent to any other. In the Locarno-selected and special jury awarded feature The Adventures of Gigi the Law, director Alessandro Comodin anatomizes the insular dimension of enforcing law to its most rigorous form, and as a result, seamlessly makes mundanity appear uniformly to the fantastical, thus brilliantly interrogating the nature of the work entirely.
Fashioned with a minimalistic verite flavoring, the film chronicles the non-linear duty of Gigi (short for Luigi), a local patrol officer tasked with surveying a small rural district gently existent somewhere in the Italian countryside. Though I must admit my overall ignorance to the system of Italian law enforcement, the gradual unveiling of Gigi's patrolling doesn't take too long to note itself as nothing much beyond involved and largely abstained from tense conflict. During an early scene (and the film's most openly dark) where Gigi and a patrol partner for the day stumble upon the descriptively gruesome scene of a young woman's seeming suicide at a railroad crossing, the duo inform a nearby agency to instead deal with the conflict in front of them. When subsequent details of routine confirm Gigi's role as largely that of a helpful pair of eyes, one can concur about a network of specialized sectors serving individual designations within Italy's police force. Straining away the hands-on investigation and civic offense many commonly associate with the job, Gigi's simplified duties made up of relaxed drives on delegated routes and casual roadside wellness checks on the incidentally encountered signal to a small life of a few consistent variables stringently arranged, assembled to be deterrent from much unexpected contingency. The same old yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Comodin maps Gigi's constrained experience through revolving segments of three key camera placements. A diagonal close-up of Gigi in the driver's seat of his patrol car, a reverse shot of the same set up aimed to the front passenger seat (often cut to playfully to reveal an arbitrary deputy) and perhaps the most mesmeric, a POV mounted on the dashboard, spectating the world and beyond from behind a glass frame, or windshield. Deploying a filmic philosophy comparable to that of James Benning, where landscapes act as functions of time, the long, often static, and routinely assembled takes sketch the work of this benign branch of policing with a dulled point. After an hour or so in, this explicit dullness, which starts as cordial before gradually transitioning to inconsequentially meandering, shows subtle signs of wear as Gigi, plainly professional and likably friendly for most of the duration, begins expressing personal frustrations partially unbeknownst to the viewer, but hinted to be brought on by the monotony of the job. Gigi's expected professionalism slips as he grows ever more flirtatious with his attractively described radio dispatcher Paola. An amiable run-in with a next door neighbor envelops into heated exchange over unkempt garden plants on Gigi's end. And concern (or beef) for a vaguely introduced character named Tomaso spirals into an apparent obsession, climaxing in a distinct scene at night where Gigi confronts the man in the tangled and overgrown web of his yard as the film's presentation abruptly shifts to handheld photography for the moment. This unforeseen manic episode is bookended with a shock whip pan to a nearby speeding train and a suggestively framed shot of an unknown woman in police uniform, unbuttoning her shirt before Gigi's normalcy is jettisoned back into. His situation is then left off with a finely instituted role change as he trains a new female hire, who he opens up to and then appears to be replenished by (but also questionably resembles the woman in the fantasy sequence, possibly suggesting more to Gigi's condition).
Though elusively put together and not by any means a conventional representation of fantasy, the insular world building that Comodin invisibly constructs by his usage of routine depiction and enclosed reality cleverly devises and contextualizes the everyday industriousness of Gigi's mundane labor as itself an entire lived in world of its own rules and behaviors, viewable only through the construct of this line of work. The observation not only resounds as one completely unseen and unimagined in the cinema by myself, but also places new questions and ideological graspings to that of policing and labor in art overall. The well-studied observation about the abstract of role assignment (boosted by the wearing of uniforms and handling of specialized equipment, e.g. a police car) creating separate trains of personable characteristic and perception is cross-examined from both the dilemmas of fiction and psychological attribution ingeniously and effortlessly. And if we are to continue the dialogue on the politics of representation, probing both the labor and how it shapes, and therefore propagates, motives and actions from the individualistic level to the systemic, should undoubtedly be recognized as well. A truly idiosyncratic and illuminating work, this one.
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