We waited for our theater to open, a Romanian lady and I, chatting. She hadn’t been home for forty years, she admitted — not even since the end of Communism. Ceausescu (she spat the name like poison) had imprisoned her father for seven years. For what, she didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It went without saying, in fact, that her father had been innocent, and his imprisonment unjust. It was the perfect warm up for the film we were about to see.
Police, Adjective. I was trying to get a handle on the film’s title. How can “police” be used as an adjective? Oh, yeah — duh. Police station. Police car. Police state. Hmmmmm, there’s a possible connection. Police, Verb might have been an equally apt title, I mused, since the action follows a young cop who follows a suspected drug dealer — relentlessly. The cop is as obsessive as Inspector Javert, and much less interested in the letter of the law than in justice — and on that distinction the film comes to turn. All Cristi the cop has on Victor the kid is an occasional hashish cigarette. One of the kid’s friends has turned informant on Victor — some friend: his motives seem dubious. All Cristi knows for sure is he doesn’t want to send the kid to prison for something that wouldn’t get him arrested anywhere else in Europe — and since Romania wants nothing so much as being part of Europe, the laws are bound to change. So Cristi follows — doggedly, patiently — hoping to settle things one way or the other. And so we follow, too, doggedly, hopefully as patiently, as Cristi silently watches and waits.
The film’s director, Corneliu Porumboiu, makes sly reference to his stubbornly stolid visual style in his 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), when a character is curtly ordered to put the camera on a tripod and leave it there. But if the camera work is plainspoken, the structure is wildly unconventional: half that film is a real-time talk-show debate — over whether a Romanian town actually had its much-celebrated anti-Communist revolution. Romanian comedy, like Scandinavian, is deadpan — black (though not as black) humor, toughened during decades under Communism and centuries under the Turk. A stoic absurdity as survival skill: that, and patience.
Christi’s depthless patience, his iron focus, keep Police, Adjective from being a comedy — despite lots of comedic touches. The director moves the camera more, since he is following a chase, but the aesthetic remains bare-bones, paralleling Cristi’s no-nonsense approach. Porumboiu, on the other hand, displays a wonderful flair for nonsense: the plot flow continually interrupts with baroque and even silly digressions, obstacles to Cristi’s forward motion that no American TV cop ever faced — in getting information from internal departments, from delays caused by his colleagues’ different work priorities and personal eccentricities, their conversations about the merits of cold remedies, of Prague versus Romanian cities, a messy clog of humanizing details.
“Why can’t we just go from Point A to Point B?” one can almost hear Cristi complain. In fact, that’s pretty much what he says to his wife, Anca, in one of those side-tracks, an extremely technical discussion of metaphor and other literary topics. Cristi asks why a songwriter, if he wants to say something, doesn’t just say it directly — instead of talking about fields and flowers. In question is a schlocky internet love song his wife keeps playing. For her part, Anca shows a professional level of expertise, expounding on pronominal adjectives and anaphoras with a chirpy, matter-of-fact precision. This conversation isn’t just another colorful digression, though. For film, too, has its grammar, and Porumboiu employs some of the very rhetorical devices they discuss. Anaphora, for example, involves the repetition of a word sequence at the beginning of successive verses. In the film, repeated scenes of Cristi opening his office door and turning on the light effecta similar poetic rhythm. (Someone who knows grammar as well as Anca — and Porumboiu — might be able to identify other such parallels in play.)
Meanwhile, art isn’t the only dimension under consideration. The relation of laws on the books (which he is presumably pledged to enforce) to larger notions of justice also trouble Cristi. If some Romanian Academy can arbitrarily change the spelling of a word or define the rules of grammar, why should he stand by while some equally bureaucratic authorities ruin the life of some innocent to conform to some arbitrary legal standard? Such thorny issues are hashed out in Socratic style with the lacerating humor of Aristophanes. Cristi’s conscientious objections put him on the receiving end of a hilarious word studies led by his boss, who insists on going by the book (as in dictionary.) This discussion of personal conscience as against some official standard make for a profound weaving of form and content in Police, Adjective to generate an unexpectedly rich texture.
This film would make a great double feature with the first episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog series, the one where an overconfident language professor (who thinks a big enough computer could even compose poetry) is confronted with a mystery that no rational formula can master. I’ve always thought it most significant that Kieslowski begins his investigation of moral reality with the implied question of whether ethics is closer to a science or to an art. Likewise, it seems significant that Porumboiu wants to talk about the nature of ethics using an aesthetic that regards his characters more than just vehicles for information. Police, Adjective collides the poetic and prosaic to raise questions about the thickness of the ground on which we all stand — and offers another example of how Romanian filmmakers are enriching the grammar of cinema: by breaking the rules.