NIGHT PATROL (2022) – comedy film online

Directed by: Iosif Demian
Script: Iosif Demian
Cast: László Mátray, Ilinca Hărnuț, Zsolt Bogdán, Ada Condeescu, Cuzin Toma, Manuela Hărăbor, Laurențiu Damian, Simona Bondoc, Răzvan Vasilescu, Michaela Prosan, Tudor Istodor, Ioachim Ciobanu, Sara Budrala, Francisc Patakfalvi, Edith Alibec, Sergiu Finiti, Levente Nemes, Cristian Ioan, Carol Ionescu, Judith State, András Demeter, Imola Gáspár, Florin Beciu, Mihai Fusu, Simona Ghiță
Producer: Anca Puiu, Smaranda Puiu (co-producer), László Kántor (co-producer), Zsuzsa Kulcsár (co-producer)
Cinematography by: Iosif Demian
Edited by: Réka Lemhényi
Sound: Gábor Erdélyi
Music: Erika Józsa Demian
Year: 2022
Category: Feature film
Genre:  Drama, Comedy
Duration: 116 minutes

159,070 – Cinepub viewers

PLOT SUMMARY

The last rehearsal before the premiere runs late into the night. A seemingly insignificant detail disturbs the euphoria of success. The actors’ dressing rooms and toilets are closed, the dresser has disappeared without explanation.

Forced by the circumstances, the characters leave the theater building, go out into the street wearing their costumes from the show. Without access to their own clothing, without papers or money, without their cell phones or car keys, the actors feel overwhelmed. The protection of the stage is gone, the text of the play that united them has faded. They gradually realize that they are simply being thrown into the unknown of the night. Gradually, the group falls apart, each one finds the shortest way home. We learn of their fate long before the curtain rises on opening night.

AWARDS:

• 2022 – UCIN – Screenplay Award – Iosif Demian
• 2022 – UCIN – Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Margareta) – Ilinca Harnuț
• 2022 – UCIN – Costume Award – Oana Păunescu
• 2022 – NACU – “Adrian Enescu” Original Music Award – Erika Józsa Demian

CRITICAL REVIEWS:

“Iosif Demian’s Night Patrol is a calophilic and multi-faceted meditation on the fate of the actor, with sometimes tragic, but more often comical twists. The imagined happenings and dialogs are a little implausible, their leading role allegorical rather than realistic. At the same time, the adventures retain a charm of storytelling and imagery that delights the viewer’s eye, while the spirit is invited to reflect on the unnaturalness of art. (…) The artist’s hypostases are manifold: clown, sexual object, dream weaver, prisoner of his own celebrity, manipulator, witness to the despair of his fellow man or mirror of his fellow man’s sadness and despair. Each of these is at once a disguise and a trap from which they cannot escape.” – Cristian Caloian, agentia.liternet.ro

“The frames are carefully composed and draw attention to themselves. The night lighting is so well conceived, and the camera so carefully maneuvered, that the city itself becomes a theater stage. For in Demian’s case, the author’s film is a total auteur, as he not only directs and writes the screenplay, but also handles the camera (the art that originally made him a star).” – Cristian Caloian, agentia.liternet.ro

“The movie includes a number of significant references to movie history. In the end, we learn that the characters are actors, and their diverse world is born on a (theater) stage. The cleaning woman disappears with the key to the performers’ wardrobe, and they become prisoners of the theater – without money, phones, and their street clothes – stripped of their worldly masks. Is the director-screenwriter’s message that the art of film is superior or at least comprehensive to theater? The film integrates or prolongs the scene – with all its rigors – which shackles the actor forced to escape into a liberating formula.” – Roxana Pavnotescu, agena.liternet.ro

“Night Patrol unfolds in a surrealist, almost dreamlike light, unfolding with the absurdity and hilarity of Scorsese’s After Hours. “ – Roxana Pavnotescu, agentia.liternet.ro

“The movie is at once Antonioniesque (“The Night”) through the sensuously slow, sensual shots around the director’s beloved, Felliniesque, carnivalesque – the harlequin woman with beautiful eyes, through her clothing, tattoo and stage movement, the atmospheric musical line by Erika Jozsa Demian – and above all, Bunuelesque.” – Roxana Pavnotescu, agentia.liternet.ro

“In order to enter into the ambit of this absolutely original creation that Demian regales us with, you need sensitivity, culture… philosophical, literary, musical and, above all, cinematic. This is the only way you can find and appreciate the discreet, subtle, refined and reverential references to Antonioni’s “Blow Up” or “Night”, toTatos’ “Sequences”, to Resnais’ “L’année dernière à Marienbad” or Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (a young man, however, compared to the octogenarian Demian!)” – Bogdan Burileanu, agentia.liternet.ro

“The title itself, “Night Patrol”, warns us about the particular angle of view and the movie’s own way of realization, through the apparently parodic/referential play on the famous painting of the same name by Rembrandt. Even if it’s a simple paraphrase, the affinities of the (more or less “pictorial”) image artist that Iosif Demian was from the very beginning cannot be taken out of the equation.” – Valerian Sava, “Mono-dialoguri filmo-critice (73)”

“The air of the film recalls, on several levels, the controversial Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, criticized for his practices, especially in the scandal surrounding the film Last Tango in Paris (1972) – incidentally, the pivot around which another significant scandal was fought, locally, in 2018, between Dezarticulat and the film critic Andrei Gorzo.” – Emil Vasilache, cinepub.ro

“At their best, the episodes are curious, bizarre; at their worst they are uncomfortable fantasies. Even though we’re dealing with a fictional product about the world of theater, the discourses it contains have damaging reverberations all around. If in the past it could have been said with ease and disregard for any form of responsibility “let them be, they are artists”, now, in the light of the testimonies that have emerged on a social level, based on revelations about what abuse means in the world of theater, film, and even in the universities where real monsters nest, the discussion becomes complicated. Damn complicated.” – Emil Vasilache, cinepub.ro

TRIVIA:

• Asked about his artistic process, Iosif Demian declared that he does not follow any recipe: “For me, each film is an opportunity to test my physical and spiritual limits that characterize me at that moment.”(I.D.
• The director associates the journey of his characters with man’s journey after death: “Let’s say that one day it will all end. You set off on the road without your car keys, without money, without papers, without everything that characterizes you, without your personal costume. And you hit the road. What will happen – is a mystery.” (I.D.)
• Demian refuses to pigeonhole the movie into a particular cinematic genre.
• Every personal story in the movie has a philosophical key, the director says.
• Manuela Hărăbor, the actress who plays the harlequin woman Flora, says the movie is a neural workout for the audience.
• For Ioachim Ciobanu, the role of Guțu is one of the landmark roles in his acting career (revistafilm.ro).
• Filming took place in Caracal.
• Iosif Demian is currently living in Australia, where he settled after being forced to leave Romania during the communist regime because of his uncomfortable films, which were stopped from being shown by the censors immediately after their release. His debut film, “A Girl’s Tear“, which was presented in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival (“Un Certain Regard”, 1982) was followed by “Rainbow Balloons“, “To Kill a Bird of Prey”, “Piciu”.
• In Australia, he was head of the Australian School of Film, Television and Radio Operations at the Australian School of Film, Television and Radio in Sydney from 1988 to 1997. Among his former students are Dion Beebe (“Miami Vice”, “Collateral”, “Chicago”), who won an Oscar for his cinematography of “Memoirs of a Geisha”, and Warwick Thornton, who won the Camera d’Or in 2009 for “Samson and Delilah”. In 2000, Demian was the cinematographer of “Stories of Olympic Glory” (dir. Bud Greenspan), the official movie of the Sydney Olympics.
• The film is made with the support of the National Center of Cinematography in collaboration with the Romanian Television Society, UCIN, Dacin Sara, Cinema City, Media Investment, Publicis Groupe, Zenith Media, House Media, OTP Bank, Groupama Asigurări, Cris-Tim, La Fântâna, Kafune, Aureliana, Novum by the sea.

LINES:

“Have you seen 9 1/2 weeks? The movie. He put honey on her lips. He put… chili peppers. He gave her ice cubes, and she licked them.” – Sebi (Zsolt Bogdan)
“Don’t stop, come on! He’s my husband, leave him!” – Cara (Ada Condeescu)
“What she does, she does for pleasure. She’s an actress. That’s why she’s so expensive. That’s because it’s like a role in the theater. She changes the audience every night.” – Johnny (Toma Cuzin)
“They don’t steal your money when you sleep. He waits for you to wake up, then he asks you nicely; if you don’t want to give it, he slaps you and only then does he take it.” – Johnny (Toma Cuzin)
“When he doesn’t have customers he recites poetry. I do my job (…), I change the sheets.” – Johnny (Toma Cuzin)
“I also refused the director. The director of the show.” – Cara (Ada Condeescu)
“When the cake comes, I’ll ask you each to pick a candle and blow out in the order in which you were my lovers.” – Edith (Edith Alibec)
“Do you like jokes? I’ll tell you a joke.” – Obo (Laurentiu Damian)
“I once asked a friend of mine, a fakir, if it doesn’t hurt when he sits on that bed full of nails. And he answered with a question: You think it doesn’t hurt? It hurts, like any human being. (…) But I’ve learned to accept pain and nails.And to live with them.” – Obo (Laurențiu Damian)
“I don’t have a phone. Never had one.” – Obo (Laurentiu Damian)
“Land of dog-catchers!” – Bebe (Răzvan Vasilescu)
“Guys, seriously now. Are you Arabs or Africans?” – Bebe (Răzvan Vasilescu)
“I give you these Africans as a present. They’re not my workers. They go out at night, I know where to meet them, I round them up, tell them one thing or another and take them with me. In the morning you bring them to the station and hand them over. A hundred euros each. Don’t worry, no one asks you where you got them.” – Tănase (Sergiu Finiti)
“Search her underwear to see what she’s hiding!” – Policeman (Cristian Ioan)
“Take the kid in your arms!” – Gore (Tudor Istodor)
“Don’t you disappear, or I’ll find you in your ass.” – Matei (László Mátray)
“I sit here and dance until Jeni comes. I invoke Pina Bausch.” – Charlie (Judith State)
“The audience will applaud. But usually the audience applauds the actors, the show – no matter how bad it is.” – Matthew (László Mátray)

ARTICLES:

• “Night Patrol”, directed by Iosif Demian, will be available from Friday in cinemas across the country – iqads.ro
• “Night Patrol”, directed by Iosif Demian, from June 17 in cinemas – jurnalul.ro
• The film “Night Patrol,” by filmmaker Iosif Demian, in the Darvas House, inaugurating a space for cinephiles – agerpres.ro
• “Night Patrol”, the latest film by renowned Romanian filmmaker Iosif Demian, will premiere in Romanian cinemas from June 17 – ziarulmetropolis.ro
• A reverence for half a life – Night Patrol at TIFF, 2021 – agenda.liternet.ro
• Decentralizing the stage – street to ‘Ramp Lights’ – ‘Night Patrol’ at TIFF, 2021 – agenda.liternet.ro

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