All the bad apples

Films set in police training college are usually low comedies stuffed with jokes about helmets and horse's bottoms. El Bonarese is not short on humour - it even contains an old gag on the phallic possibilities of the truncheon - but its uniformed characters would have ground up Steve Guttenberg, star of the original Police Academy movies, and sprinkled him over their doughnuts.

Part document of official veniality in his native Argentina, part road-to-ruin picture, Pablo Trapero's film is daring in its choice of hero. Zapa (Jorge Roman) is a trainee policeman in Buenos Aires, a taciturn monobrow about whom there is little to know and even less to like.

When he is alone, he stares blankly into the middle-distance. When he's around other people, he complies with their wishes without argument.

He only sheds this passivity when he is having sweaty, aggressive sex with one of his teachers (Mimi Ardu).

During these scenes, you are given plenty of time to examine his peculiar body hair - which stops very suddenly at a kind of tide-mark halfway up his buttocks - but few opportunities to guess at what might be going on inside his head.

When we first meet Zapa, he's a locksmith in a small town somewhere out in the sticks, who is collared by the police after using his skills to crack open a safe for a seedy criminal gang.

Instead of being charged with the robbery, he is despatched on a bus to the capital to take up a trainee position with the city's police force.

This isn't a fresh start. In fact, as the dishonesties and brutalities of his colleagues are slowly enumerated, it's revealed as something between a mildewed and putrefied one. A lot of crime is committed in El Bonarese - racketeering, extortion, murder, assault, theft, mugging - and most of it by men and women in blue serge uniforms.

When these police officers are depicted interacting with the public, they are demanding money with menaces, shooting them in the back of the head or kicking them as they lie handcuffed on the ground.

When they are celebrating at their Christmas party, they amplify the local firework display by filling the air with hot revolver bullets.