Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Traffic Department

Wojtek Smarzowski’s Traffic Department is a Boschian view of corruption in contemporary Poland. Its main focus is on seven thoroughly corrupt police officers. But the film makes the police corruption only the tip of the iceberg. By film’s end the entire business, political and government structure has been implicated, with the pervasive self-seeking leading as far as murder.
The first multi-sinful driver who offers a bribe is a fat priest. In the second religious image, a pedestrian line of nuns causes an abrupt stop and collision that bring poetic justice to a cop being orally served in the back seat. In the other poetic justice, the wife of a white racist cop gives him a black baby son — and claims she was raped.
Indeed poetic is the only justice these cops effect. Their unfaithful wives respond to their promiscuous husbands. The only real police work we see is the central figure’s energetic investigation to clear his name when his wife’s policeman lover is found murdered. This indignant cuckold has been having an affair with his partner.
Typical of the pervasive corruption, an early radio report of a scandal in professional soccer is followed by the hero’s young son’s report that his soccer team has been offered a bribe to lose the next game. Even after his father’s moral awakening, he advises his son to win but that “It’s only a foul if a bone sticks out.”
This alternately shocking and funny thriller is difficult to follow because of its meld of various forms of visual evidence. Straight photography is intercut with surveillance footage, cellular camera footage, video recordings, compounding the difficulty of establishing any pure truth.
In the last scene our severely compromised cop gets a full honour funeral — at which in a high angle long shot we see some police executive arrested and hauled away. The pretence of honour and the pervasive corruption rest in uneasy balance.

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