Police, adjective

A cop movie from Romania = promising. A dual Certain Regard award-winner at Cannes 2009 = warning signals.

Police, Adjective, writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's second feature, follows his sadly comic multi-award-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest. That film looked at provincial citizens' pre-Revolutionary ideas (16 years after the toppling of the country's dictator); this one focuses on one confused man.

Would an undercover policeman have qualms about arresting, and inevitably destroying the life of, a non-criminal youngster who smokes and shares hashish? Would his superiors in the police and judiciary force him to ignore other options? Would a sardonic police captain spend a long time, in one static scene, getting the detective to read dictionary definitions of conscience, police and moral as nouns, verbs and adjectives?

Would he trail the grass smoker for days, and should a movie director trail him for minutes on end? Would a recently-married policeman have a non-communicatory relationship with his wife, and a movie director screen many minutes of him eating gruel alone in the kitchen while his wife plays banal pop music on a laptop?

Would many movie-goers want to watch very long long-shots of nothing dramatic? No, not when an anecdotal fable worth filming in a half-hour short film is spun out for more than 100 minutes. As an intellectual exercise, the movie is intriguing, and its bitter conclusion made inevitable by the cleverly-assembled detective work in the dictionary. A minor diversion for the eyes and brain, nothing more.