It took me more than a decade to get to see Corneliu Porumboiu‘s second film, made in 2009, ‘Police, Adjective‘. The film presented and award-winner at Cannes and other important festivals of that year was one of the most representative films, perhaps even the most typical, of the minimalist style of the New Romanian Wave of the first decade of our century. The wave passed, the awards taken by Romanian films at festivals became rare, Romanian cinema began to go in various other directions, but Porumboiu remained together with Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu a well-established and respected name in the international film world. The late viewing of this film allowed me to see it from the perspective of the time elapsed since the premiere and of the subsequent films of Porumboiu and his generation colleagues. It was, I think, a good opportunity to re-examine the themes of Romanian films of the period, the qualities but also the repetitive patterns and the problems that viewing these films pose to viewers, which have become more obvious now, when the elements of novelty and surprise no longer exist.
The story in the movie is relatively simple. In Vaslui, a provincial town where nothing ever happens and, not coincidentally, the director’s city and the place where his debut film ‘12:08 East of Bucharest‘ took place, the young policeman Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is assigned on the case of a high school student who is denounced by a colleague of his who is also a police snitch, that he is a drug dealer. It is clear that the boy is a marijuana consumer, but the drug traffic accusation does not seem well-founded, and may be rather caused by the rivalry of the two teenagers for the same girl. Cristi tries to avoid framing the boy as his boss demands, knowing that this would land him to several years in prison for a minor crime. The policeman acts more according to what his conscience dictates than according to the letter of the law. But are these notions, these words – ‘conscience’, ‘law’, even ‘policeman’ – clearly defined in a society that still seems confused after communism and is slowly learning the lessons of democracy? At some point, a dictionary will appear.
A few words about the translation of the title of the film, ‘Police, Adjective‘, a title under which it was distributed on the English-speaking market. ‘Polițist, Adjectiv‘ in Romanian uses a form (‘polițist’) which is indeed both a noun and an adjective as opposed to the English form (‘police’) which is a noun or verb. Thus, part of the linguistic subtlety is lost through translation, wasting one of the key elements of the film along with the gray and sordid rectangularity of the cinematograpy. Viewers need to be very careful not to miss the few seconds when the ‘adjective’ in the title is on the screen filmed from a dictionary page, and remember a previous discussion between the film’s hero and his wife, in which the metaphorical meaning of words is contrasted with their dry and direct meaning.
The acting is excellent. Dragos Bucur melts in the role of Cristi, the young policeman. Vlad Ivanov in the role of police chief dominates most of the film by his absence, but when he appears he is impressive, as always. The sets offer us a representative, almost documentary image of the Romanian world the first decade of the century: the dark corridors and the offices at the police station, the muddy streets and the standard blocks of flats of the provincial town, the apartment of a couple at the beginning of their marriage. The police routine and the routine of life occupy most of the screening time, which is quite common in Romanian films in the ‘minimalist’ style. However, this is also the main problem and the challenge faced by the spectators, which became even more visible after a decade from the production. The film is intelligent and conveys a sensitive and important message. The characters deserve attention. The core of the film that demands the interest of the spectators is buried in reality details. I know it’s intentional, but it seemed to me excessive. I don’t think that we needed to see the hero eating the whole dinner or waiting for long minutes in the boss’s waiting room in order to understand the passage of time. ‘Police, Adjective‘ is an interesting and well-made film, but the dose of minimalism in it is maximum.