‘A Cop Movie’ Review: When a Uniform Is a Costume
This strange and ambitious Mexican film plays like a combination of “Cops,” “F for Fake” and “When Harry Met Sally.”Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, “A Cop Movie” has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate. It’s as if someone combined “Cops,” “F for Fake” and “When Harry Met Sally.”Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios (“Museo”), the film, from Mexico, initially appears to be a straight documentary. It opens with a sequence in which Teresa, one of the two main police officers, responds to a call about a woman in labor. After Teresa radios to check on an ambulance that isn’t coming soon enough, she grabs gloves to deliver the baby herself, even though, she says, the academy didn’t give her medical training.Exactly what training Teresa has becomes murkier. If the high-stakes situation doesn’t immediately indicate that “A Cop Movie” isn’t playing by ordinary documentary rules, the splashy wide-screen compositions, use of zooms as punctuation, careful camera setups and subjects’ habit of commenting toward the viewer all signal that something is up. By the time Teresa is breaking the fourth wall — yes, there’s a fourth wall — while cradling a colleague who has been shot, Ruizpalacios is clearly employing dramatization. Narrative expectations come into play when he reveals that Teresa and her partner, Montoya, are romantically involved.It would be easy to give too much away, but “A Cop Movie,” viewed one way, is a fake documentary that establishes its unreliability, then recasts itself as a documentary of a deception. It equates performing official duties with playing a character; the audience’s distrust may mirror a civilian’s distrust for authority. And as in the Stanford prison experiment, the uniform makes the officer.A Cop MovieRated R. Violence and a bit of sex. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
