You're In Bucharest Now, Baby!

“Comrade Detective” (Tovarășul Detectiv), Television Series, 2017(first 3 episodes)

While the U.S. producers of this film thought it would be good fun to satirize a Romanian cop buddy picture by putting so-called ‘absurd’ Communist words in the mouths of the two protagonists, the tactic actually backfires.  This 6 part series tells the tale of two tough Communist Party detectives on the trail of a violent smuggling ring in Bucharest.  Drug dealers are trying to get rich, along with the smugglers.  The smugglers are in league with the U.S. embassy.  Smuggled Jordache jeans are thrown from trucks to screaming Romanian women.  Bibles in English are part of the smuggling trade, helped by a group of deranged fundie Christians.  A Monopoly© game is smuggled into Romania in the lining of a car.  It is an intentionally convoluted and idiotic plot.

Whose Making Fun of Whom?

A man in a Reagan mask kills the partner of Gregor Anghel, one of the detectives, and his rage runs through the rest of the series. Handsome, manly, a drinker and prone to easily losing his temper, Gregor’s actually a copy of many ‘hard-boiled’ American TV and movie cops.  The absurdity reflects back.  He has a penchant for sleeping with good-looking and seductive American embassy officials in order to shake down information – much like James Bond, a Brit spy.  In a discussion with his police partner, Iosif Baciu, they both agree that torture works.  However, varieties of illegal brutality are used by U.S. cops to this day in TV and movies…as long as they can keep it a secret from the police internal review pansies, that is.  Not to mention our own government under Bush authorized torture against ‘terrorists’ across the world.  And then there was Vietnam and the Phoenix program.  So they are not alone, though we are supposed to believe that only Commies torture.

But the real fun is in the Communist ideas used by Gregor and Iosif and even some border guards, the latter who refuse to be bribed and are killed by the smugglers.  The conservative or the clueless viewer will miss the irony embedded in this series’ attempt at exposing Communist ‘propaganda.’  Others will realize that propaganda cuts two ways and sometimes just one.

Iosif is appalled that the game Monopoly© urges players to drive every other player into poverty.  We are supposed to laugh, but he’s actually not wrong.  Gregor calls the drug dealers ‘capitalist’ turds and we are supposed to laugh at that too.  Drug dealing is a business just like any other, in pursuit of profit.  It’s purely capitalist, it’s just not legal yet.  So how true!  Isosif makes fairly lengthy observations on the unscientific idiocy of religion, things like believing bread is really the ‘flesh of Christ.’  We are supposed to laugh again, but every atheist and agnostic in the audience will agree with Iosif.  Or the Reagan mask as the face of the killer?  Anyone who lived through the ‘80s Reagan recessions, the union-busting, the war making, the ‘war on drugs’ the 'evil empire' rhetoric, the 'welfare queen' attitude and all the rest will quite plainly find NO problem with the killer wearing a Reagan mask.   THAT is good satire.

At various times both Gregor and Iosif denounce the capitalist obsession with endlessly working for money.  Isoif says it is family that should be the most important (he has two kids and a wife.)  Very few in the audience will not agree with Iosif.  There is even the classic 'buddy' scene, similar to so many U.S. cop movies where Gregor the bachelor heart-warmingly eats with Iosif's family.  Much is made of their mispronunciation of “Jordache©” jeans, showing what clueless bumpkins they are.  Gregor shoots at the smugglers throwing the ‘fitting’ jeans to the crazed Romanian women, which is a funny scene in itself. No one wears Jordache© jeans any more, by the way.  Essentially the U.S. is portrayed as a seductress, with its sexuality and its luxurious commodities luring upstanding Romanians to their doom.  Which does have the ring of truth…

Iosif has come from the Romanian countryside so Gregor calls him a ‘goat-fucker’ to much hilarity. Yet Iosif is the brains of the two and he gives Gregor a volume of Marx, as Gregor’s idea of Communism is ‘with his fists.’  Given most of the viewers of the series have probably never read any Marx, they might scoff.  I’d say giving a book to a co-worker is not the travesty that the producers want to make us believe.  But they want to make you feel that ‘this’ book is a farce.  Next time in a U.S. school, check what political views are acceptable.  Endless hosannas to the Federalist Papers or the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights should make you realize that Romania is not alone.  And giving a book to a co-worker at work?  Downright pointy-headed!

Gregor, Iosif and their police boss, hospital doctors and others make many comments about how great Romania or Bucharest or the medical system is – as if this kind of “Romania First” mentality is that much different from the constant U.S. diet of nationalism.  Again, it rebounds back into the supposed intent of the program.  Was that their real intent – to create a fake Romanian detective story to make fun of Hollywood or U.S. TV detective shows or U.S. propaganda?   Are they secret subversives?  Like “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Hurt Locker,” it is not the intent, but the result that counts.  While trying to make fun of the demonization of the U.S., the series actually highlights the anti-communist demonization practiced by nearly every film or TV show to come out of the U.S.  From my count, this series, at least up to Episode 3, makes more truthful fun of capitalism than the reverse.

Other reviews on this topic:  “Zero Dark 30,”“The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “Red Harvest,” "Bad Cops, Bad Cops," "The Wire," "Rise of the Warrior Cop," "BlackkKlansman."

On Amazon© and tvonline.cc.

The Kulture Kommissar

March 10, 2019