Poliţist, Adjectiv

Corneliu Porumboiu (2009)

A young detective called Cristi (Dragoş Bucur) is watching the movements of a teenage boy suspected of smoking hash.  We watch Cristi watching.  The early sequences are confidently paced, taking their own time to introduce us to Cristi’s physical environment:  the impersonal, unadorned offices and corridors of police headquarters; the streets outside – sunless and often empty of people too, except for one moment when Cristi’s vigil is interrupted by a gaggle of students arriving at college.  Cristi goes on watching the suspect; we go on watching the watcher.  In the process, we find out that Cristi has misgivings about what he’s doing:  his superiors in the police want him to arrange a sting and the teenager arrested and sent to prison but Cristi doesn’t like the idea of the boy being punished in that way.  Besides, he tells the district prosecutor, Romania is behind the times:  possessing or smoking dope doesn’t carry a prison sentence in Western Europe – it’s only a matter of time before the law changes in Romania too.   Police, Adjective, written as well as directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, is at one level formidably boring:  I was struggling to stay awake beyond the usual snooze stage.   But I wanted to remain conscious and the struggle was worth it.  The boringness is genuinely intrinsic:  tedium is one of the film’s themes and helps to make it ultimately interesting – and enjoyable.

From early on, the long, silent passages are interspersed with verbal exchanges – the participants in these pay a striking (but never implausible) attention to the meaning of words.  Cristi and some of his workmates regularly play ‘foot tennis’ (we eventually get to see one of these sessions – it looks like a good game).  A colleague wants to join the group and Cristi says no, for one reason then another.  The huffy reject sarcastically asks if Cristi makes the law about who can and can’t join.  Then, in the course of the conversation in which Cristi first questions the ethics of arresting the teenage boy and anachronistic Romanian law, he talks with the prosecutor (Marian Ghenea) about Prague (where Cristi recently went on honeymoon) and Paris (‘Why didn’t you go there?’ the prosecutor asks), and about Prague being known as ‘Little Paris’ as well as the ‘Golden City’.   Cristi comes in from work late one evening; his wife Anca (Irina Săulescu) is working online and playing repeatedly a banal love song.  (While the computers we see at the police headquarters appear antique to Western eyes, Anca’s looks relatively state of the art.)  In their small apartment, the song gets on Cristi’s nerves.  He makes grumpy, sarcastic remarks about the soupy rhetorical questions its lyrics contain (‘What would the sea be without the sun?  It would be the sea of course’).  When Anca replies at first that she’s not paid any attention to the words, we assume she’s not that way inclined but then she starts analysing the lyrics and their construction, the symbols and images being created through them – in a way that takes us by surprise, and which floors Cristi.  This is a very funny scene.

All this leads up to the long, climactic sequence in the office of the police chief Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov, the baleful abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), who asks Cristi to explain himself then instructs his secretary to find a dictionary.  Anghelache then tells Cristi to read out dictionary definitions – of conscience, law, moral and, finally, police.  The last of these is particularly interesting and not only in explaining the film’s title.  As I understood it, the Romanian word politist is equivalent to the French policier:  as a noun, it means an officer of the law; as an adjective, it describes a type of book or film.  The presence of the word politist in the film’s title might therefore seem to suggest a standard police thriller.  This couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only in the lack of thrills.  For example, Cristi mentions to Anghelache that his wife told him he’d made a spelling mistake in his latest written report.  We may be used to cops confiding to their wives during sleepless nights but we don’t expect them to share documentation after hours.  You think Cristi may get into trouble for showing reports to Anca but Anghelache ignores it:  it’s the semantic debate he’s interested in.

Anghelache and Cristi then have a difference of opinion about the etymology of the word ‘police’:  when Cristi refers to the German polizei (with its flavour of law enforcement), Anghelache reminds him that the word’s source is the Greek polis – a city or its citizens.  Corneliu Porumboiu’s interest in words is thorough and his putting them in the foreground of Police, Adjective is fearless and unusual.  On more than one occasion, the text of the ‘pursuit’ reports that Cristi compiles is conveyed not only in voiceover but fills the screen as an image.  Shortly before the climactic dialogue with Anghelache, there’s a conversation between Cristi and his wife:  Anca, who has turned out  to be more academic than airhead and treats her husband a bit condescendingly, reminds Cristi that the official legitimacy of words in the language is a matter for the Romanian Academy.  It’s at this moment that the political dimension of Porumboiu’s linguistic theme becomes pretty clear and the exchange with Anghelache spells it out in further detail.  The continuing state control of words, like its drug laws, illustrates Porumboiu’s view that post-Communist Romania isn’t nearly as modernised as some other East European countries.  (The computer hardware and pop music may not compare favourably either.)  We see a European Union flag at one stage – a reminder that Romania joined as recently as 2007 (with Bulgaria):  the Czech Republic, where Cristi honeymooned and the drug laws are more liberal, was one of the 2004 entrants.

One central element of Police, Adjective is problematic.  It’s necessary – in order to bring out the linguistic and political elements – and acceptable at a metaphorical level but it’s unrealistic, and this is more of an issue because of the film’s ultra-realism in other departments (especially Cristi’s real-time vigils).  The idea that the protagonist thinks it makes sense to ignore the law of the land because it’s out of line with that of other European countries – and that he’s prepared to stick to this point of view so stubbornly that he puts his job at risk – doesn’t (even allowing for the fact that he questions the ethics of his job) make sense.  It might be more convincing if Cristi started asking deeper questions about why the law should always be respected – at home with Anca, say.  As it is, you feel he keeps pretty quiet about this because anyone he mentioned it to would tell Cristi not to be so daft (and, once they’d done so, Corneliu Porumboiu would have irreparably weakened a main theme of his film).  The writer-director’s investment in the metaphoric also causes to you to wonder whether the crime rate in Romania is really as low as it appears to be:  there’s never a suggestion that Cristi might need to devote his energies or thoughts to another case in the foreseeable future.

But the film works very well in its association of ideas.   As we observe Cristi at his work – trying to achieve something he doesn’t think it’s right to achieve, questioning the purpose of doing a job when you don’t believe in what you’re doing – we begin to wonder about the point of watching a movie which consists largely of watching a man engaged in an activity he sees no point to.  There’s an artistic rationale to the repeated stretches of silence as Cristi trails his suspect.  The message that this is repetitive and soul-destroying work is easily and quickly conveyed.  For a while you wonder why Porumboiu is continuing to make the point but there’s a weight to these scenes because we come to feel that we’re enduring them with Cristi and that we understand what he’s thinking.   The technique pays off most handsomely as Cristi and his colleague wait for their interview with the police chief in Anghelache’s outer office.  You know what’s on Cristi’s mind; as you watch him sitting waiting, you virtually enter his head.  The camera dwells on objects in the office long enough for them to become familiar; the relentless ticking of the secretary’s fingers on the computer keyboard also contributes to the sense of actually being in the place that you’re watching on screen.

As Cristi, Dragoş Bucur never smiles but his sallow, hangdog, skinny presence is so relentless that his lugubriousness becomes droll and very likeable.  (The promoters of the film have obviously seen that, in the shot of Bucur that appears on the poster.)  Because we get to find out by other means what’s going on inside him, Bucur’s opacity is very effective.  The last shot of Police, Adjective shows the back view of a police officer demonstrating on a chart to colleagues how a sting is to be carried out.   We assume, of course, that it’s Cristi but we don’t see his face.   Which is right:  he’s lost his individuality and become just another law-abiding cop, another political conformist.

4 October 2010