Police Adjective Review

• 15th Feb 2011

There has been something of a resurgence in Romanian cinema in the past four or five years and Police Adjective is the second feature from, Corneliu Porumboiu. In his first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest, Poumboiu created a witty political drama about a television show, people in the city of Vaslui talking about wthe revolution of 89 and the fall of dictator Ceaucescu. The result is a funny and fascinating study of time, place, truth and distortions of memory. By contrast, Police Adjective is a very slow moving drama about an undercover cop. Cristi, the cop, is tasked with following a young man who smokes pot with his girlfriend, being caught could incur a seven year prison sentence. This gives Cristi a pang of conscience and a change of heart, ultimately leading him to ask his boss if he can be excused from the sting operation about to be put in place.

The last twenty minutes of the film involve the police chief trying to coerce Cristi into reconsidering his decision by going through dictionary definitions of conscience, moral, law and police. As bizarre as this scene may be, it is the crux of the moral message. Up to this moment, Police Adjective is a painfully slow examination, even by Romanian standards. There is a theme running through the film about howthe semantics of language become all pervasive and persuasive.

The film is shot in Porumbiou’s hometown of Vaslui in northeast Romania. The same location as his first feature. Cristi and his partner call the city Little Prague with its burnt out domed church in a mocking manner. It is a rather characterless, communist era city made of grey apartment blocks and unkempt streets.It is the lengthy twilight/dawn shots of Cristi walking down the streets amongst the lit streetlamps that provide any aesthetic mise-en-scene, giving the film an overall impression of urban poetry.

In many ways the film is worth sticking with, even though this must be considered one of the slowest moving police dramas ever made, totally devoid of guns, car chases or violence. But if you’re a lover of foreign language films with the patience for a single Spartan philosophical message then you may get something out of this nearly two hour drama.

Chris Hick