for this week´s TRIBUNE : ‘Police, Adjective’ (7/10)

Police, Adjective
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu

It’s sometimes said that actor/actress X is so compelling that you could happily listen to them reading out the phone-book. But to construct a movie whose 20-minute-plus finale pivots on a character proclaiming definitions from a dictionary is sign of scripwriting chutzpah indeed. The screenwriter in question is Romania’s Corneliu Porumboiu, and his film Police, Adjective is sufficiently successful in fulfilling its lofty ambitions that it confirms the considerable promise of his 2006 debut 12:08 East of Bucharest – a picture which, with dark humour and bracing intelligence, analysed chronological rather than semantic distinctions in a specific retrospective political context.
   Both of Porumboiu’s films have won significant prizes and ecstatic reviews at Cannes, many attendees speculating why Police, Adjective wasn’t put into the main competition at last year’s festival rather than the slightly edgier sidebar known as Un Certain Regard. The international critics of FIPRESCI named it the best movie in that section, which also included such subsequent international arthouse hits as Dogtooth, The Father of My Children, and Precious.
   Still only 35, Porumboiu is thus firmly positioned as a leading crest of what’s been called the Romanian New Wave – alongside the likes of Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu). And it’s encouraging that so many examples of this still-buoyant movement are popping up in our cinemas, even if it’s taken Police, Adjective – one of the slower, more reflective variants – well over a year to obtain UK distribution.
   It’s essentially a character-study story of Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a thirtyish cop in a drab-looking Bucharest unnamed town whose latest case involves drug-dealing teenager Alex (Alexandru Sabadac). Though only recently married to an schoolteacher (Irina Saulescu) who specialises in etymology and the teaching of the Romanian language, the monosyllabic Cristi is evidently something of a lone wolf. The couple’s mealtimes have a slight edginess (“something between us isn’t working”) which would delight the recently deceased Claude Chabrol, and our hero spends most of his time out on the mean-ish streets conducting old-fashioned ‘leg-work’. He observes Alex from afar – and we in turn observe Porumboiu observing Cristi observing Alex: ‘watching the detectives,’ indeed…
   In extended (sometimes challengingly so) scenes which give new dimension to the term ‘police procedural,’ Cristi assembles his evidence – which he then writes up longhand, the pages presented on screen for our careful inspection. As Cristi prepares to present his dossier to his superior, Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov), he’s increasingly afflicted with moral qualms. Is Cristi merely an agent of the state and the law? Or is there any room for subjective personal morality in the life of a police officer? Aren’t these “just crazy kids,” doing what teenagers all over Europe do – in many countries, quite openly?
   Such thorny questions (which have obvious, unstressed implications for Romania’s recent police-state past under Ceausescu) are duly confronted in the aforementioned climax – in which the bemused, implacable Anghelache makes repeated resort to a hardback dictionary. This is a country, rather like France, where the ‘purity’ of the language is taken very seriously indeed – not for nothing does Bucharest call itself the ‘Paris of the East.’
   Roughly equal parts Life on Mars and University Challenge, with a dash of Harold Pinter and a touch of Samuel Beckett, this astonishingly talky stand-off – nearly all executed in a single fixed shot – is fascinating to watch as the upper hand alternates between Cristi and his obstinate, inexorable boss (“Don’t you know the meaning of the words you use?”) while a pair of colleagues occasionally chip in from the sidelines.
Ivanov, unforgettable as 4 Months‘ callous abortionist, cements his high rank among European cinema’s leading character-actors, loading his silences and expressions with as much significance as his blunt-instrument dialogue. The continent can likewise boast few film-makers with the structural audacity of Porumboiu: as in 12:08 East of Bucharest, Police Adjective is assembled with evident attention to the macro and the micro – every little detail, however apparently insignificant, contributes to the overall design (“not J for Judas – C for Christ”).
   The result is a flinty little Moral Maze of a movie which is perhaps more intriguing to ponder, debate and analyse than it is to actually watch – Porumbiou’s “deliberate” pacing and exhaustive, slate-grey verisimilitude, with less in the way of leavening humour than 12:08, may well be too much for some audiences. And, when push comes to shove, Cristi’s great moral dilemma is ultimately wrapped up with startling, jarring abruptness.

Neil Young
19th September, 2010
written for the 29th September issue of Tribune magazine

POLICE, ADJECTIVE : [7/10] : Politist, adjectiv : Romania 2009 : Corneliu PORUMBOIU : 115m : seen at UBB theatre (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) 5th June 2009 – Transilvania International Film Festival — original report : {19/28}