23/06/2023 - Romanian director Bogdan Mirica’s second feature centers on a troubled character torn between his secret criminal affairs and his dysfunctional romantic relationship

After playing with Western genre norms within an Eastern European landscape in his successful feature debut Dogs [+see also:
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interview: Bogdan Mirica
film profile] (2016), which landed straight into Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, Bogdan Mirica’s recent Boss, just presented at the Romanian Days sidebar competition of the Transilvania International Film Festival, dishevels film noir stylishness by placing a marginal protagonist in the scruffy post-communist urban environment of Bucharest. Naturally, classic North American cinema genres could hardly be themselves in an Eastern context, and what therefore appears to be more valuable in Boss than the plot is the local context as a background layer.

An unnamed taciturn ambulance driver (Laurentiu Banescu) is involved in an armed robbery. During the bustle, he accidentally hits a woman who might be capable of recognising him. Scared and guilty, he tries to visit her in the hospital, which puts him in danger, while also wandering around the city in an attempt to find out more about his fellow robbers and eventually about the boss of the whole operation. On the upper, supposedly “normal” surface of his life, appear his young beautiful girlfriend Carla (Ioana Bugarin) in blood-and-thunder scenes, and his father with whom he has gruff discussions — a clear sign of their mutual dissatisfaction. The ambiguous, dreamlike ending is perhaps the only episode that brings some hope to the overall dark atmosphere of Boss.

The criminal side of the script, written by Mirica himself, suggests a comment on current Romanian reality — against the background of the visibly impoverished city, one might guess that the ambulance driver is pushed to crime due to his low wage and overall lack of opportunities, in an environment of pervasive corruption subtly revealed by certain narrative details. While this aspect might seem relatively justified and somewhat interesting, the irrational unfolding of the protagonist’s overdramatic relationship with Carla gets on one’s nerves. Her shaky character, placed somewhere between femme fatale and a defenceless doe begging for protection, is the epitome of immature male wet dreams. This wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for the insistently serious tone of the dialogue between the two. Тrite exchanges of lines such as “Why are you sitting in the dark? – I’m an angel of darkness” provoke spontaneous laughter, but the theatrical facial expressions of the actors, the long takes on contemplative stares, and the over-the-top score unequivocally suggest that the comic element is not part of the directorial concept. Тhis feeling is also reinforced by the dynamic camera of Mirica’s partnering director of photography Andrei Butica (Dogs, Everybody in Our Family [+see also:
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film profile]), which attempts to create a feeling of anxiety with acrobatic angles in suspenseful moments. However, the general inadequacy of the script takes away from the tension typical of the crime genre, and despite the uplifting denouement, the overall experience is rather tedious, in part too because of the long duration of the film. 

Boss is a co-production between Romania’s 42 Km Film, Luxembourg’s Les Films Fauves, and Sweden’s Filmgate Films.