Yohan Guignard studied film at the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne is in Paris, somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral. It must have been quite a transition for him to go from the centre of Paris to the passenger seat of a policeman’s car in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. The short film, Random Patrol, which screened at the IDFA documentary festival in November, consists entirely of a ride along with policeman Matt Hoffer. We can’t be sure what it is that Guignard was looking for, but the result is a bewildering and strange journey.
The impression here is of an episode of COPS directed by Werner Herzog. Gone are the predictable domestic violence calls with drunken people yelling and stumbling on their front lawns, or high speed chases that end with the discovery of various kinds of drugs and drug paraphernalia. Instead, it’s mostly just Matt driving around on what he calls a ‘random patrol.’ He has no destination, no purpose no particular ambitions. He’s just driving around on a mostly pleasant day and not much happens.
From Matt’s point of view, we might think that this is intolerably boring. But, Matt assures us, as he hops into his large SUV, that he always worries if this is the day when he’s going to die at the hands of a criminal. Looking around, we wonder why. The suburbs he cruises through seem calm and pleasant enough. The overall mood of the film, though, for this viewer at least, was one of existential dread. Not because I was worried about Matt being killed. Rather, watching Matt driving around the totally nondescript neighborhoods, empty parking lots, listening to him explain what it’s like to be a police officer, all of this made me feel lost and alone in the universe. Imagining myself to be either Matt or someone living here, as life here is depicted through Guignard’s lens, felt as though life itself had no destination, no purpose and no particular reason to continue. The random patrol with this random cop was weirdly and oppressively depressing.
My guess is that Guignard had the opportunity to include more action than we see here but chose not to. Matt makes one stop in which he tells someone that she can’t park where she’s parked. It’s pretty mundane. Then there’s a car accident that’s treated in such a matter-of-fact way that it seems utterly ordinary and unexciting. This is perhaps accurate for the police, and Guignard captures the routine mood here very well. There is another call where Matt is instructed not to enter the house right now. We don’t get any information about what’s going on and we never find out what happens here. This fragmentary and inscrutable situation, as the director has framed it, seems rather Kafkaesque.
Perhaps the most intense moment is when a random civilian approaches the SUV. Matt’s reaction is quite alarming since he draws his gun and holds it concealed but at the ready should the civilian turn hostile. Is this normal? We wonder. Do the police always have their guns ready to shoot us if we want to ask them a simple question in their car? Hard to say. But Guignard does not push this angle. This film is not a diatribe against the police or guns. The impression of Matt as an unpleasant man comes through loud and clear. But again, this is not what the filmmaker wants most to convey.
I could not help wonder what Guignard himself thought about all of this and whether his intention was to instill these unpleasant emotions. I also could not help but wonder how different the film would have been if the passenger with the camera had been an American from Oklahoma rather than a European. Matt seemed to open up to Gugnard in ways that I suspect he wouldn’t have with an American.
One of the striking images we see several times throughout this simple yet powerful film is that of a road partly submerged in water. It’s not clear if this is the result of bad weather, flooding, or if this is simply normal. But impression of being trapped in a land that’s slowly sinking is what most affected me.