Police, Adjective

Police, Adjective is a Rumanian film directed by Corneli Porumboiu in 2010. A certain genre of police films are characterized as “procedural” – that is, they concern the day-to-day operations of law enforcement officers in apprehending criminals. Police “procedurals” are about stake-outs, writing official reports, and gathering evidence. Ordinarily, the procedures shown in the film are implemented in the service of solving some heinous or dramatic crime – Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, is an excellent example of the genre. Porumboiu’s film is the ultimate police procedural – the entire film is comprised of long takes involving a hapless young undercover cop stalking a teenage kid who smokes hashish. The cop has been corrupted by a honeymoon trip to Prague – in that city, he saw people smoking marijuana openly on the streets and has concluded that the law imposing harsh sanctions in Rumania for possession and supply is anachronistic; “it will be changed in a few years,” he says. The young cop can’t bring himself to make an arrest or set up a sting to catch the teenage kid. Reasonably enough, he thinks that the sting and arrest will ruin the kid’s life. So he temporizes, extends his investigation into useless minutiae, claiming that he’s trying to catch the kid’s supplier. In fact, his conscience won’t let him make the bust. The film is remarkably pure and ascetic – although whether this is a virtue must be left to the individual viewer. We learn nothing about the kid who is the target of the investigation – there is no attempt to inject any sentimental or personal motive into the cop’s hesitancy to perform his duties. Rather, the police man simply concludes that the law is unjust – apparently based on the evidence of his honeymoon trip – and refuses to do his job. The detective is called before his boss and a remarkable, if exceedingly protracted, debate ensues about the meaning of conscience, duty and the moral law. The debate involves detailed and laborious analysis of the precise meaning of Rumanian words – hence, the puzzling title: the young man is not yet a “police man”; rather he is defined by the adjective “police” – the conundrum that the film addresses is whether the young cop will actually become a “police man” as opposed to someone merely involved with the law. The final shot of the film shows plans for a bust drawn with precision on a blackboard. The entire film has something of the character of a blackboard schematic, a theorem drawn on a board to be debated and either accepted or rejected. The philosophical riddle that the movie poses is similar to that propounded in Melville’s Billy Budd – what is the meaning of the law and what is its relationship to justice? But in contrast to the capitol crime in Melville’s novella, the stakes in the Rumanian film are ludicrously tiny. Polumboiu stages a curious scene in which the young man and his bride discuss proper spelling and word usage – she seems to be a grammar school teacher. The Rumanian academy establishes the rules for orthography (Rechtschreibung as the Germans would say) and those laws, it seems, must be followed although they are arbitrary. The correlation between proper grammar and spelling and the enforcement of the law is one of mysteries that the film explores. The film is interesting but painful to watch – there’s no suspense, no drama, nothing of pictorial interest and Polumboiu’s characters who are always waiting for one thing or another are shot in real time: we wait with them. And we wait for something to happen, but it doesn’t.