ot since Corneliu Porumboiu’s (2009) has a cop movie been so sublimely uneventful as Alessandro Comodin’s , a slack portrait of an affable officer in Friuli’s . Pier Luigi Mecchia (a.k.a Gigi)—the director’s real-life uncle, effectively playing himself—performs his perfunctory patrol in the town of San Michele al Tagliamento, but Comodin’s film is more modern pastoral than police procedural. It’s typically incantatory, owing primarily to the protagonist’s Friulano accent, first heard in a nocturnal prologue wherein an off-duty Gigi defends his overgrown garden from the remonstrations of an unseen neighbour. Prolix to a fault, even comically absurd, the quarrelsome exchange is framed such as to create a man-nature dyad that looks, to all appearances, like someone arguing with the deep green fronds of a tree under an
