Country: Romania
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Time: 1 hour and 55 minutes
What It Evokes: That old cliché Kafka-esque and philosophies of the absurd
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
Romanian film is good. In baseball, the statistic WAR (Wins-Above-Replacement) measures the quality of a player against the average replacement-level substitute available to teams. It’s a neat way to evaluate skill, a sort of narrowed measure of opportunity cost. All of this is to say: Romania’s film WAR is high. I don’t know the expected “excellent film” output from a country with just under 20 million people and a GDP-per-capita half of Portugal’s, but I am confident Romania exceeds expectations. Why? I don’t know—I would be interested in theories about why certain countries develop innovative film industries. Why is Iran’s film WAR so unbelievably high when compared to demographically similar countries? Anyway, I stray. The point: Romanian film is really innovative and special. Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) explored an abortion, in detail, under the Ceausescu regime, which had banned the practice. Radu Jude keeps shapeshifting across works like I Do Not Care If We All Go Down In History As Barbarians (2018), a darkly comic take on the 1941 Odessa Massacre. Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose (2013) examined dark mother-son relationships in trying circumstances. Alexander Nanau’s truly incredible documentary Collective (2019) examines investigative journalists uncovering public health malfeasance in Bucharest and just got nominated for the Oscar’s Best International Feature. Finally, our film, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, examines ethical choices (and grammar) within calcified systems of law and order.
Cristi is a novice cop following a threesome of young hash smokers for reasons that don’t appear completely convincing to him. (There’s some talk about finding a dealer and a supply line but these avenues of investigation never appear.) Instead, once the kids have been identified by the system (i.e. the local Vaslui cops), Cristi’s job remains to tail them from location to location. Given the criminal penalties facing the kids and the extensive time for rumination available to Cristi—tailing “criminals” has never been so dull a task as in Police, Adjective, all captured in long shots underscoring the drudgery of the job—he begins to doubt the justice of his task and, slowly, develops a plan to forward his misgivings and, perhaps, change the mind of his superiors. Along the way, a couple of musings on grammar foreshadow a final sequence in which Cristi’s doubts collide with his boss’s superb handling of a Romanian dictionary and seemingly insurmountable logic (sophistry?). It is a brilliant final scene that emerges from the steady unfurling (in what often feels like real time thanks to the pacing and sequence shots) of Cristi’s dilemma. Be forewarned, this is a slow film. Slow in a good way, but slow nonetheless. Yet, in its deliberate and stylized manner, Police, Adjective captures something true, beautiful, and dispiriting about life (in particular about jobs, marriages, and linguistics) and the logics we invent to underpin and justify them, logics themselves derived almost entirely from the unplanned workings of immobilized customs and traditions.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Corneliu Porumboiu — 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)
Cristian Mungiu — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)