Police, Adjective (2009)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Police, Adjective (2009) – C. Porumboiu

Was there a Romanian New Wave in the Oughties?  I’m only just catching up.  Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) and Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) were both great ultra-realist tales showing the bleak state of life in Romania.  Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2009 film follows Puiu by taking a black comedic look at present day post-communist Romania, specifically the (role of the) police force.  Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is a moody undercover cop who is tailing a couple of high school students who are smoking hashish; one of them has informed on the other.  Cristi’s preference is not to bust the suspect because the jail sentence would be too steep and he doesn’t want to ruin the kid’s life (which otherwise seems normal and upper middle class).  His supervisor and the local prosecutor think otherwise.  But Cristi keeps stalling – the film shows us an endless stakeout, ridiculous leads being followed up, and, of course, the relentless bureaucratic nature of police work.  At home, Cristi and his school-teacher wife discuss grammar.  Suspense builds up because nothing is happening (this is again a hyper-realistic anti-thriller). And then, when Cristi is finally called into the supervisor’s office, the coup-de-grace is an amazing scene where the dictionary is consulted and read out to determine whether Cristi has the right to follow his “conscience” (but sneakily, and more importantly, we are led to contemplate whether “police” is a noun or an adjective).  In this one scene, my brain was tickled into considering Cristi’s actions and those of the supervisor in a different light and, without missing a beat, the film resolves as you didn’t think it would (or did you?).  At this point, you can cast your eye back across the film and decide that it was indeed a comedy. Or was it? Maybe not if you live in Romania.