Police, Adj.

The new film by Corneliu Porumboiu is warmly received by the American film critics. For a list of reviews, see here. The film was awarded the Un Certain Regard jury prize at Cannes earlier in May 2009.

I'll have to put it on my list of things to see this year, when and if it hits the cinemas. The film has stormed an entire critical debate about the true merits of Cinema Verite.

Alexander Zalben of filmcritic.com writes:
"...You can take solace in the first ninety minutes, which puts [the protagonist] right in the middle of a police procedural, investigating a possible drug ring. I should maybe clarify, though. When I say police procedural, I don't mean the flashy lights, quick zooms, and punny quips of CSI and its ilk. I mean a quite literal procedural: lots of filing, filling out papers and reports, walking between offices, and lots and lots of waiting around, staking out suspects. Oh god, so much waiting around. And drinking tea. And just standing there. For minutes at a time.

This is, without a doubt, the most purposefully boring movie I've ever seen.

Then there's the second thing Porumboiu is interested in, language (the "adjective" half of the title)..."

The movie protagonist, Police Detective Cristi played by actor Dragos Bucur, is led to debate his boss Anghelache, dictionary in hand, about the merits of throwing the book at the suspect under investigation and about the meanings of words like Law and Police - as in Film Politist (Crime Thriller) and Stat Politist (Police State).

"Meticulously constructed, Police, Adjective foreshadows Cristi and Anghelache's showdown with several seemingly casual exchanges. In one, the young cop tells an older one that guys who are inept at one sport will also be bad at another. It's a "law," he says" (writes Mark Jenkins of NPR.)

And Alex O. Scott of the NY Times:

"[Cristi] deals with pushy or recalcitrant co-workers, trudges through days of surveillance work without changing his sweater and returns home for desultory conversations with his wife, Anca (Irina Saulescu), who matter-of-factly tells him that things are not working out between them and then continues as if nothing of consequence had been said.

At another point, as Anca, a teacher and something of a linguistic pedant, listens to a romantic pop song over and over on her computer, she and Cristi have a debate about images and symbols in literature. Why, he wonders, don’t people just stick with the literal meanings of words, and forget about all the fancy stuff. His position is a hyperbolically blunt statement of an impulse that drives much recent Romanian cinema, away from metaphor and toward a concrete, illusion-free reckoning with things as they are.

This can be called realism, but that sturdy old word is not quite sufficient to describe “Police, Adjective,” which is at once utterly plain, even affectless, and marvelously rich. Mr. Porumboiu’s style might be called proceduralist. Like Cristi writing his reports, Mr. Porumboiu scrupulously records details in a manner that only seems literal-minded because his technique is invisible, and his intelligence resolutely unshowy.

“Police, Adjective” tells a small story well. At the level of plot, it is consistently engaging, and the psychology of the ambivalent detective, a staple of film noir, is given a new twist in the character of Cristi. But the more closely you look, the more you see: a movie about a marriage, about a career in crisis, about a society riven by unstated class antagonisms and hobbled by ancient authoritarian habits. So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book."

PS. The film can apparently be seen here. For a Google English translation of that page, see here.