A.C.A.B. - All Cops Are Bastards (2012)

Stefano Sollima's 2012 debut follows four members of a Roman riot squad, the Celerini, through stadium sweeps, evictions, and the slow unraveling of their private lives. A young recruit joins for the salary, his mother faces eviction, and the public housing meant for them has been occupied by a squatting immigrant family. The film tracks this quartet with a driving rhythm and a keen interest in bruises, both administered and received. It is a drama about men who hit people for the state and then go home to empty apartments.

On the matter of representational ambition, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white Italian almost without exception, and the immigrant characters who drift through the frame, a squatting family, a man named Mustafà, a mosque leader, function as scenery for the men's grievances. Tensions between police, Ultras, immigrants, and neo-fascists form the ambient noise of the city, but the film advances no thesis about race. It has no interest in gender beyond wives and ex-wives, and no engagement with sexuality, environment, disability, or neurological difference. A passing reference to a high-paying salary and one eviction subplot gesture at economic strain without building any argument from it.

Which leaves the matter of instruction. There is none. Sollima is not here to teach, and Variety, reviewing the film, was troubled by how thoroughly it seemed to savor the sadism and vigilantism it depicted. This is the rare case of a picture whose moral posture is so murky that critics accused it of the opposite of preaching. The result is a lean, unpleasant, competently assembled piece of work that resists every attempt to extract a lesson from it. We are left with the bruises, and with a squad of men who believe in nothing except each other.