Cinema: New release - Police, Adjective
Published: 30 September, 2010
by DAN CARRIER
THERE is something darkly haunting and fantastically original about Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s minor crime tale.
Starring the superbly scruffy actor Dragos Bucur as a police officer asked to investigate a crime that he does not think exists, this is a wonderful, weird and at times hilariously well observed offering. I’m confident to state I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite like it.
The opening scene is utterly confusing: a long and slow walk by two people through a scabby city in post-Ceausescu Romania. The shots are taken from far away, so you can see the pair of them at one moment, and then watch as one disappears as the other saunters through the shot.
It is a slow start, agonisingly so at times, but it will pique your interest enough to get yourself involved in a film that offers surprises, and not in the usual, skeletons-jumping-out-of-a-cupboard kind of way.
Christi (Bucur) is a cop who is on possibly one of the most boring assignments of his life. He is asked to tail a kid who has been accused by one of his friends of selling tiny amounts of cannabis.
His boss wants a full report – which reads like the most anodyne waste of a life to compile, ever, period, and on paper may seem to be an even odder thing to make a feature film about.
But it has hidden depths. For starters, the drawn-out sequences of Christi gathering “evidence” for his report, following the boy he is watching, checking discarded cigarette butts for traces of dope, bickering with a fat colleague who wants to play foot-tennis but frankly isn’t welcome, to opening and closing lockers simply to retrieve a lost lighter, all have a trance-like quality. It feels like you are being hypnotised.
But there is a deeper question that emerges, and it is about the way we face minor ethical choices on a daily basis.
Christi is asked to compile evidence on the flimsiest basis and finds himself trying to persuade his chief that by stitching up this teenager he’ll ruin a life unnecessarily. It transpires that the boy has been accused of dealing small amounts by a “friend”, who has designs on his girl. This story spins out in a straightforward way and the city of Vaslui provides a wonderfully downbeat backdrop.
This is no arty Euro flick that belongs in the end-of-year portfolio of a Romanian art student.
Don’t get put off by a slow opening and unconventional story line.
It is odd, yes, but innovative and has a finale that will leave you exiting the cinema with a grin and having a head-scratch.
Above all, it considers those minor moral dilemmas we all have to regularly confront and states that how we tackle them is the mark of our characters.