Slow-moving Police, Adjective is hard to decipher

At my son’s soccer practice the other day, I learned that one of the team dads is from Romania. Looking for a way to extend the conversation, and to establish my credentials as a cinephile (and a cosmopolitan one at that), I noted that in recent years Romanian filmmakers had stepped into the international spotlight. The communist-era abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in 2007, and other films with equally precise and deadpan titles, like 12:08 East of Bucharest, have appeared on the world cinema radar.

But rather than being pleased that I had at least heard of his native land’s cultural success, the soccer dad looked a bit concerned. “You know,” he cautioned, “I’m not sure than anyone except a Romanian could understand a Romanian film.”

I had been planning to tell him that I was going to see the new Police, Adjective, which itself won the Un Certain Regard award at the most recent Cannes Film Festival, but his response stopped me short. I left the conversation feeling a little puzzled, but after seeing Police, Adjective I feel like I understand the conversation better than I do the film.

The film has been called an anti-police procedural, but it’s more precise to call it a procedural taken to absurd lengths. Officer Cristi (Dragos Bucur) has been tailing a young hashish smoker for several days, trying to determine if he’s a dealer or a simple user. Because he watches the lad for so long without seeing anything happen, he determines that he’s the latter. When Cristi’s superiors order him to go ahead and arrest the boy as a user, he resists. As a matter of conscience, he says he can’t ruin the boy’s life for doing something that probably won’t even be a crime in a few years.

On the film’s surface, that’s pretty much all that happens. I’m presuming that, for those more attuned to Balkan/ex-Soviet Bloc life, something is happening beneath the surface, but for the most part, that something eluded my grasp. A great deal of time is spent debating the meaning of words. You know those scenes in American movies where the brash detective, Dirty Harry or whoever, gets called into his superior’s office and gets chewed out for not following procedure? And then the rouge detective tells his superior where he can stick his procedure? Well, in the Romanian imagination, these scenes play out quite differently.

When Cristi objects to the arrest on the grounds of conscience, his superior sends for a dictionary and has Cristi read the definition of "conscience" out loud, along with the definitions of “moral” and “police.” No desks get pounded. No voices are raised. Just a dry reading from the dictionary. But the dryness here isn’t droll (at least not to me) in the Jim Jarmusch manner. It struck me as being pretty straightforward.

The film’s approach must be a legacy of the communist era, when words were malleable things that meant whatever the authorities claimed that they did. In fact, except for the fact that a few private sector Romanians now drive Range Rovers, I would have guessed this was set before the fall of Ceausescu.

In any case, I’m afraid that my fellow soccer dad is right; in order to appreciate Police, Adjective, you really had to be there.
 

• arthouse, cinema, film, Police Adjective

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