J Paul Johnson
It’s often all too easy, some five or more decades in, for a neo-noir to rely on a set of tired tropes that lapse into cliché. A morally dubious protagonist, a labyrinthine path into crime and corruption, a fatalistic worldview, a doomed romance, a narrative filled with twists, turns, and double-crosses—a film can rely so much on the shopworn that it becomes subsumed by its genre identification, a neo-noir and nothing more. But Unidentified, a Romanian-language thriller new this week to streaming and VOD, finds ways to imbue the neo-noir form with twists and themes that suggest this decades-old idiom still breathes new life.
Directed and co-written by Romanian director Bogdan George Apetri, who teaches at Columbia University, Unidentified’s plot is unambiguously neo-noir. Police detective Florin Lespas (Bogdan Farcas) toils away in his unremarkable station in a small Northern Romanian town. His precinct chief, Comisar Sef (Vasile Muraru), prone to ethnic slurs and casually racist remarks, seems distrustful of Florin’s competence, refusing to assign him the district’s most pressing case: a pair of similar hotel fires, suspected acts of arson resulting in multiple (unidentified) deaths. But once Florin gets his eyes on the case file—and its gruesome images of the fire’s unidentified victims—he can’t let go. Fatigued, distressed, and bordering on obsession, Florin takes his investigation off the record.
So there is, to start, the police-procedural criminal investigation that makes for a hallmark of neo-noir. Florin soon discovers a link between the two fires: a security guard of Roma descent and slurred by the police as a “gypsy” was working at both locations the nights of both events. But the Roma, Bănel (Dragos Dumitru), denies any culpability, and lacking further evidence of arson, Florin seems at a dead end. There’s nothing to prove a crime, nor is there anything to suggest Bănel’s guilt. That might be perceived as good news, but not to the increasingly frayed Florin.
And that’s not all that plagues the detective. There are money woes, to start. He owes a colleague a debt he can’t pay, and bill collectors are on his trail: he’s behind on his mortgage and car payments both. Worse, as he discovers on surveillance, his estranged wife Stela (Ana Papescu) is now having an affair, sneaking off to a hotel on the outskirts of town for a midday rendezvous with another man. Haggard, chain-smoking, nearly delirious in his fatigue, Florin takes it upon himself to solve the crimes and his personal problems with a decision that will itself prove fatal. With Bănel set to take the fall and Stela to be punished, Florin seeks to mete out a justice of his own.
Doing so—especially within the conventions of neo-noir—requires an elaborate, even convoluted plan, one that might be beyond Florin’s limited capacities and fraying mental state. On the surface, it may seem foolproof. But can he account for every contingency, anticipate every happenstance? Will it, even if perfectly successful, solve his problems and achieve justice? Viewers conversant with the subgenre already know the answer to those questions.
As Florin, onscreen for nearly every minute of Unidentified‘s 123-minute running time, Bogdan Farcas (who in some scenes slightly resembles a younger, less imposing Liam Neeson) presents an utterly compelling, convincing depiction of a man so frayed at the edges his judgment becomes suspect. His creased visage, salty beard, and long hair seem to grow more scraggly with each scene; he can’t find time for a change of clothes, and his ill-fitting denim shirt drapes across his uneven shoulders like it would a broken-in-half coat hanger. Yet at the same time, his obsessions are compelling. Unlike some noir protagonists, he’s not driven by lust but instead by a quest for justice motivated by betrayal and vengeance.
That Florin’s estranged wife Stela is a piano teacher creates another means by which Unidentified plays with genre convention. Film noir relied, first, on the bombast of Miklos Rosza and later, urban jazz, with neo-noir later evolving into everything from fusion to alt-country to hip-hop. Chopin, though—now that’s a twist. The film’s use of classical music lends it a stately, timeless quality lending a soupçon of grandeur to its pedestrian criminality, an elegant touch to an increasingly gruesome narrative.
And then there is that plot twist. Neo-noir tends to rely on surprise, but as it nears its conclusion, Unidentified takes its viewers on a journey across its Romanian landscape to someplace entirely surprising—and meaningful. Without divulging the whats and whys, I’ll just note that the ending serves up some desserts you may find less than just, but no less than perfectly meaningful. The events may come seemingly out of left field, so to speak, but the film’s final notes provide an unanticipated treatise on corruption, prejudice, and misogyny, outlining exactly how these toxicities fester like malignant, incurable cancers.
Unidentified‘s is a destination, however circuitous, worth the journey. Its lead performance, elegant cinematography (by Oleg Mutu), and twisty narrative provide a new take on a recognizable idiom. For all its success in employing and refashioning genre tropes, I was a bit surprised to see its one of its two named female characters (granted, it’s a small cast) serve as nothing but an object, scarcely identifiable except through the protagonist’s lens and then the target of his ugly revenge. The film’s conclusion hardly endorses Florin’s actions but can’t see Stela as anyone, anything more than a plot point. What woman wouldn’t abandon this motley loser for a better prospect? Unidentified isn’t going to pass so much as the second of three Bechdel-test criteria, much less win any praise for its feminism.
The film’s take on police corruption, especially in regard to the treatment and scapegoating of minority and indigenous populations, is far better detailed, especially with its twisty conclusion. Like the best neo-noir, Unidentified presents, ultimately, a moral ambiguity that will stick with viewers for some time after its characters’ fates—whatever or how deserving they may or may not be—are sealed.
Unidentified won the Special Jury Award in International Competition at the Warsaw Film Festival and two awards at the Romania’s prestigious Gopo Awards. It appears on streaming and video-on-demand services Sept. 16, 2022.
