Comrades voice-over oddball show
Romanian drama ‘Comrade Detective’ gets help from Gordon-Levitt, Tatum
“The conversation turned to: ‘What if we made our own show and dubbed it?’ ” Brian Gatewood
On so many levels, Comrade Detective is not what it appears to be.
In essence, it’s a Communist propaganda message wrapped in a macho buddy-cop drama wrapped in an ’80s period piece.
If that’s not confusing enough, the biggest names — Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jenny Slate, Chloë Sevigny and Mahershala Ali — are off-screen, dubbing the voices of the Romanian actors starring in the six-episode Amazon Prime series, due Friday.
And the pretense that this is an archival Romanian TV series is fake: It was shot quite recently.
“When people hear, ‘Oh, we went and made a Romanian cop show,’ they’re like, ‘What? I don’t understand what that even is,’ ” says Tatum, an executive producer who dubbed the voice of the rule-breaking lead detective.
Comrade’s producers were inspired by Woody Allen’s 1966 directorial debut, What’s Up,
Tiger Lily?, in which he dubbed a Japanese spy film to make it seem like a search for an eggsalad recipe. However, they couldn’t get the rights to a real state-produced propaganda series of the era, such as Czechoslovakia’s 30 Cases of
Major Zeman, says Brian Gatewood, who created the series with Alessandro Tanaka.
“The conversation turned to: ‘What if we made our own show and dubbed it?’ ” he says. So they filmed the series in Bucharest, with Romanian actors Florin Piersic Jr. and Corneliu Ulici playing the cops.
Tatum hopes Comrade’s uniqueness will help it stand out in a crowded TV market. “It’s like nothing on any of the platforms or TV networks. It’s really so different. You need something that’s going to cut through the noise.”
Gordon-Levitt, who voices the new partner to Tatum’s jaded, violent cop, calls Comrade “one of the most oddball things” the two longtime friends have worked on.
Comrade may be set in Romania, but it references American films in style and message.
“We draw on genre tropes, like the unlikely pairing of cops,” director Rhys Thomas says. “If you took the notion that (Romanian leader Nicolae) Ceausescu said, ‘We’re going to make our version of Lethal Weapon,’ what would their observations be on the genre?”
Although Comrade focuses on communist propaganda (detective: “We need to act like Americans, and that means being underhanded and breaking the rules”), Gatewood sees it as a mirror image of ’80s films that trafficked in Western propaganda, including Red Dawn,
Rambo III and Rocky IV. “We grew up with films that were anti-Communist, proAmerican propaganda,” he says. “I grew up loving all that, taking it at face value as a kid. Then, you have perspective on it when you’re older.”
Gordon-Levitt sees the contemporary relevance of Com
rade, which satirizes the era. “My favorite kind of comedies make you laugh on the surface, but if you start peeling back the layers, there’s a lot underneath them,” he says. The show “has a lot to say about both communism and capitalism, how we form our national identity, how propaganda works, stereotypes we create about foreigners. All these themes are as pertinent now as they have ever been.”