Police beat

What kind of a title is Police, Adjective? Isn’t police technically a noun, even used attributively? This Romanian festival favorite boldly takes on a subject that might seem ill-suited to movies. It’s a film about language—how it defines who we are and how it dictates our actions.

“I was trying to see, if you want, the limit of language and the limit of meanings, because in the end we use a lot of words that don’t have their original meaning,” Porumboiu said in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie played to great acclaim after premiering at Cannes in May. (It also showed at the Chicago International Film Festival in October.)

This interview was itself the subject of some linguistic difficulties. (I was told that the Romanian Porumboiu, who spoke English for our conversation, considered using a translator later on.) But along with Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), the director has been hailed as one of the figureheads of the current Romanian new wave. All three filmmakers have used the country’s dictatorial past under Nicolae Ceausescu—here represented by an authoritarian police captain (Vlad Ivanov, the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks)—as a starting point for broader moral inquiries.

Police follows a weary detective (Dragos Bucur) charged with gathering evidence for what turns out to be the world’s slowest and most methodical pot bust. The movie ultimately boils down to a single question: Is it more important for a cop to be faithful to his instincts or to adhere to the letter of the law?

Porumboiu’s dour yet playful look at bureaucracy demands patience and a tolerance for droll art-house humor: The first half consists of long stretches during which little seems to be happening, as the detective files more reports than would seem to be justified for such a modest crime. But everything changes once Ivanov’s captain shows up; the climactic scene ties the film together in a way that should thrill wordsmiths everywhere.

“For me, the first part, when [the protagonist] is watching the characters, the actor was very important, because from his body language, from his way of walking down the street, you could realize he’s hunter,” Porumboiu says. “He is born to hunt and at the same time he has this problem. It’s a certain type of psychology that you can’t make it just with dialogue.”

One might assume that the central contrast of the film—it’s half slow-paced observation, half energetic conversation—is Porumboiu’s trademark, since his first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest, attempted something similar. But the director says in this case, the dialectic style was dictated by the subject matter.

“The people, they don’t understand each other, because they have another meaning,” he says. “[The detective’s] reports—they are written in a certain way, which makes him think in this way. Because if each day you write using the same words, the same expressions, this at the end they will influence you and your way of being.”

If anything, Police, Adjective suggests that we don’t pay enough attention to the words we use—in life or in movies. But Porumboiu suggests the minimalism and attention to language in this film isn’t necessarily a style he plans to return to. “Maybe this is coming from literature that I like—from Gogol to Chekhov,” Porumboiu says. “Minimalism I can’t define very well, because for me, if you ask me, I tell important stories.”

We never said minimalist meant unimportant.

Police Adjective opens Friday 23 at the Music Box.

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