Police, Adjective

Police, Adjective

113 Minutes

Police, Adjective is largely about the making of meaning; it uses a police investigation as a launching point and language as its conduit. Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is a small town cop in Romania, assigned to investigate a teenager who’s reportedly been smoking joints with a couple chums in the courtyard after school. When he goes to check it out, the entire scene, as is often the case with director Corneliu Porumboiu, takes place entirely within a single extended take, a wide shot taken with a long lens that divides the whole space into multiple levels of focus. In the distance, through a chain link fence, we see three teenagers clustered together, passing something around and smoking it – talking, laughing, inconspicuous and inaudible. They are in focus. Closer to us in the foreground, not a hundred feet away from them, we see a group of young children playing soccer, little out of focus blurs whipping through and across the frame. Their shouting is what we hear and, even though they’re not the focal point of the image, they are absolutely the focus of the shot, the scene. We stay on them as they continue to play obliviously, uninvolved yet a central part of the material; Cristi and his mark skulk around noiselessly at the edges. Our thoughts turn towards the same conclusion that our protagonist reaches: what’s the big deal here? Over the course of the film we come to learn that the big deal is actually just big deals themselves; Police, Adjective is an examination of the way that language affects our daily life, and how the systems we create can turn poisonous to actual human concerns through an obsession with and abuse of language.

What are the police? What purpose do we want them to serve? It’s an important question for any society to try to answer, but it’s understandably of greater concern to people who were living until just a short while ago in an actual police state. The central conflict of this film is intellectual, the effort to understand and place oneself within the rules and corresponding authority of a society, tempered necessarily by a certain amount of distrust/discomfort with what these structures can possibly lead to. What is the purpose of the law, what does justice mean? It all comes back to language – Police, Adjective. In an extended sequence, Cristi sits at home with his girlfriend (Irina Saulescu) while she endlessly repeats an old Romanian pop song on YouTube. “What are the mountains without snow, what is a field without the sun, what am I without you?” Cristi thinks it’s stupid; a field is still a field. “That’s like saying what is a toothbrush without toothpaste.” In one fell swoop, an entire (admittedly schmaltzy) sentiment is toppled over via the literal interpretation of the words behind it.

Cristi’s superior (Vlad Ivanov) wants him to bust this kid for “offering,” essentially an outdated legal distinction vis-à-vis “intent to distribute,” and one that Cristi is certain will be abolished in the near future, as it has been already in most of Europe. He doesn’t want the destruction of a reasonably innocent kid’s life on his conscience; after all, don’t the police exist to help people and not to unnecessarily hassle them? Rules are imposed with the intent of maintaining order, but when we lose sight of individual decency in the face of “the letter of the law,” they can wind up becoming impediments to humanity faster than we’re able to self-diagnose them as such. When Cristi explains his predicament to his superior, he busts out a dictionary and looks up “law,” “morals,” “conscience,” and “police,” then semantically destroys Cristi’s argument the same way that he, earlier, decimated that pop song. Both are ruthless and final acts of destruction, in the end both equally meaningless in their actual substance.

Both of Porumboiu’s features (the other is the excellent 12:08 East of Bucharest) display an innate sense of the malleability of cinematic form, a sense that he uses unhesitatingly to break apart his audiences’ expectations with a warm, subtle humor that sometimes gives way to unflinching intellectual brutality. They’ve also been, unlike other films emerging from this recent Romanian New Wave, preoccupied with the lives of people outside of Bucharest. 12:08 chronicles the efforts of a local broadcaster to discover his town’s actual involvement in the Revolution of 1989, which overthrew the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Was there a revolution in town, or did people just take to the streets after all the work was done? More importantly, what difference does it make? Just as other Romanian New Wave films generally ignore areas outside of Bucharest, Porumboiu’s films deal with that feeling of being ignored. Police continues this focus; we stay with Cristi outside of a convenience store for a good seven minutes while he hangs out and watches his mark. The clerk steps out and asks him what he’s doing. “I’m watching the pothole.” It doesn’t even register as a joke to her. What else are you going to do except bust this kid? The wheels of progress turn forward.

by Andrei Alupului