Police, Adjective

On the surface, Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective is a police procedural in which a dogged detective named Cristi (Bragos Bucur) shadows a teen fingered for dealing drugs. Porumboiu adopts a rigorously naturalistic approach as the camera observes Cristi grimly following the suspect from school to his house and back again, taking care not only to watch him, the snitch, and a girlfriend, but also to pick up their cigarette butts to check if they're tobacco or marijuana. But its when the camera slowly pans across the reports Cristi laboriously writes out by hand that the film mutates into a reverie on the use and misuse of words, as seemingly extraneous arguments about misspellings and the metaphorical use of language eventually intersect with the investigation when Cristi's superior (Vlad Ivanov) uses a dictionary to humiliate the cop—who is reluctant to ruin the boy's life by sending him to jail on what Cristi sees as a trivial matter. The captain's extreme literalism in regards to words such as “conscience,” “law,” and “police” represent the stranglehold that the rigid old communist system still has on Romanian life. It's a rare film that can successfully negotiate such abstruse terrain without becoming crudely didactic, but Police, Adjective does just that—to shattering effect. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)