QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Sometimes justice needs extraordinary means. When the ordinary – the institutional – levers of justice no longer work, new ones must be pulled. This is what I’ve always thought Greta Thunberg means when she says, “If the emissions have to stop, then we have to stop the emissions”. you can almost hear under her rebellious words coming fro the mouth of Romāns Skulte (Raitis Stūrmanis): “if they won’t stop them, then we will”. This still green young police officer in early post-Soviet Riga, learns this same lesson as he navigates his corrupt department in Red Code Blue, an epic crime saga about crime and justice, right and wrong.
The early years of independence were as chaotic as they were exciting for many former Soviet countries. The rapid changes and new vacuums of power created a recipe for corruption and lawlessness. Freedom and pandemonium often collided. It was the “Wild West of the Eastern flank,” as producer Sintija Andersone notes. This is the world Red Code Blue drops Romāns into. Bribery, excessive force, forged documents, and planted evidence are the precinct’s default setting. The cops here are so corrupt that they seem to find new ways to be corrupt.
Director Oskars Rupenheits’s newest film bookends with a core childhood memory of Romāns. A young boy (Teodors Veiherts) reads the horoscope from the paper to an old blind man (Jānis Lībietis). The man usually rewards him with change if the horoscope is good, nothing if it’s not. One day, the old man asks Romāns if he knows why he asks him to do this. He assumes it’s simply practice and to read to the blind man. The real reason is much more human: for company. He already knows the horoscope from listening to the radio. That means he knows the boy began lying to him in order to earn more money. The man then preaches a sermon to Romāns about guilt and doing the right thing. Lying to the old man was one thing when the guilt still ate at the boy – there was something holy about that guilt, keeping his moral path straightened. Then the guilt began to corrode his consciousness. This scene – and the way it rests with Romāns as an adult, thinking about how the habit of his sins altered his moral compass – also doubles as the film’s own vision of moral clarity: doing the wrong thing over and over again, without remorse, will eventually bring rot.
Despite the primary language of the police in this period still being Russian, according to the director, he wanted the film to be in Latvian. That language bias goes a long way too. Russian, more or less, exists in Red Code Blue to telegraph the bad guys. The Georgian gangsters, of course, use Russian to communicate with the cops. Russian accents and slang signal degeneracy, as if it is an antithesis to Latvianness (and, by association, goodness). The baddest guy of them all only goes by “The Armenian” (Robers Kosojans) and, like the white whale of Moby Dick, is talked about much more than he is actually seen. Rupenheits’s strong writing allows the other characters to build him up into some impregnable crime lord with a death grip on Rigan society and all Kosojans must do is put up a veil of mystery and masculinity.
In the absence of earthly justice, Red Code Blue points to a heavenly one. The original Latvian title, Tumšzilais evaņģēlijs, translates to “Dark blue gospel,” and these religious connotations lift the stakes. (There is a reason we use biblical as an adjective to describe the extreme or mythical, after all.) A church burns in the childhood prelude and traditional Latin hymns like the Ave Maria are staples of the score. There’s even a priest character!
But the most spiritual moment, one could argue, comes in the film’s only true cityscape shot. Shortly after a momentous decision by Romāns to take justice into his own hands, the camera escalates to give an establishing shot of the entire city. The church spires of the Old Town stand tall on the left; glossy modern business buildings tower proudly on the right. The clash in architectural styles almost jolts the film into the present. Church music grows louder as Romāns fades into the scale of the city. It’s as if cinematographer Juris Pīlēns defines the city by Romāns’s decisive climactic action. “This is Riga!” the skyline pronounces.
The overall incredible production quality is gently dented by a troubled sound design. The sounds of melee combat – pistol-whipping, punching, and the like – specifically can distract. The reproduction of sounds created in post-production, the foley, just isn’t compelling. Perhaps it’s just more realistic? Punches aren’t typically loud in real life. But they aren’t what our ears are used to when it comes to melee fighting. And there’s nothing specific to the film’s direction (unlike, say, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Realle Here, from 2017) to indicate this was intentional either. The gunshots sound like most cinematic gunshots too, inadvertently revealing the inadequacy of the melee sound effects. This small gaffe being the film’s biggest shortcoming is a testament to the quality of production at KEF Studio, which began as a collective of amateur cinephiles determined to make a film less than a decade ago. They don’t look like amateurs anymore.
Red Code Blue just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
