Star Rating:

Police, Adjective

Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001

Genre(s): Drama

Running time: 108 minutes

Police, Adjective is the latest of the Romanian New Wave that has offered up the likes of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and California Dreamin'. Although we've now come to expect certain things - grey streets surrounding drab buildings and comments on Ceausecu's regime - like last year's The Happiest Girl In The World and Tales From The Golden Age, Police, Adjective finds pockets of wry humour where its least expected.

Cristi (Bucor) is a young detective with a moral dilemma. His current case consists of staking out Victor (Costin), a school kid suspected of drug trafficking after a tip off from the kid's co-called best friend, Alex (Sabadac). Spending eight days following the Victor all over town has led Cristi to believe that Victor is no dealer but just a normal kid who enjoys a joint with his friend and that Alex's motives for shopping him are dubious. However, Cristi is reluctant to ruin the teenager's life for a joint and with his captain pushing for an arrest he puts his job at risk.

We've had meticulous police procedural dramas before but Police, Adjective is no Zodiac. Director Porumboi has no interest in shoot-outs, serial killers, hish-speed car chases and has no qualms of shooting long scenes of Bucor sitting at the kitchen table or standing outside a house or waiting in an office to speak to his superior. Porumboi is after subverting the cop movie cliches and the realism of the day-to-day boredom of police work that police movies edit out. While there might be a reason that movies are reluctant to shoot the downtime scenes that dot this drama - this can be quite flat, ordinary and uneventful - it also has a strange hypnotic clout.

The entire plot is a smokescreen so Porumboi can tackle the power of words and our own moral codes, which, as the film strives to point out, have no place in state law. Its raison d'etre scene sees Cristi's captain (Ivanov, again subverting the shouty captain role by remaining cool, calm and detached) asks him to look up 'law', 'police', 'moral' and 'conscience' in the dictionary in the film's longest scene (played out in one take). Before that Cristi is seen deconstructing the nonsensical lyrics of a pop song his wife insists on listening to repeatedly.

Despite the enthralling climatic scene (one of the best this year), by the close Police, Adjective feels like a long-winded linguistic point has being made. It's a bit much for a film to exist merely for this.