NYFF - Police, Adjective

Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective, one of the most highly regarded films at Cannes this year, is a funny, sharply-observed study of a young policeman, Cristi, in a small Romanian town over the course of several days as he stakes out a high-school student on a minor drug-possession case that he clearly thinks is a waste of his time. The long takes convey a sense of the real space, duration and tedium of this surveillance without being the least bit tedious to an observant viewer. As Porumboiu said after the screening, there is always something happening in these shots, even though the film is edited in arthouse rather than multiplex style. The same deliberate pacing is maintained throughout, including scenes of paperwork in the office or at home with his wife in the evening. One of the most interesting structuring elements of the film is the detailed reports he prepares following each day's stakeout, where what we've just witnessed is summed up in meticulous detail. This concern for precise language carries over into hilarious domestic scenes where he questions his wife, a teacher, about the meaning of the words in a silly pop song she listens to repeatedly, and she corrects the grammar in one of his police reports.

When Cristi dares to refuse his boss's request to wrap up the case by arresting the kid on such a petty charge because it goes against his conscience, he is forced to read dictionary definitions of the words "conscience," "law," "moral," "police," on and on until he ultimately relents. The scene is both comic and harrowing, with Vlad Ivanov brilliantly portraying the bureaucratic mindset of this character. The new post-Communist Romania, it's implied, still has quite a ways to go to catch up with Western Europe.