Cannes. "Police, Adjective"

By David Hudson on 05/16/2009

[Updated through 5/22]

"No festival worth its salt will want to miss Corneliu Porumboiu's follow-up to the Cannes Camera D'Or-winning '12:08 East of Bucharest' (2006)," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen. "Not only does his new film, set for Un Certain Regard this year, confirm the promise of his debut, but it goes one step further in its sober attempt to achieve the maximum with the minimum of means."

"The emphasis on observation in the recent upsurge Romanian cinemas has, in the films I've seen, always been a style and not a commentary," writes Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook. "Corneliu Porumboiu's enthralling 'Politist, Adjectiv' [site] changes that quite simply, and does so by telling a policier so banal that its participants - and the audience - really have little else to do but question the interpretation of facts, images, and text.... And what is a cinema audience but investigators?"

"The small-town police are hot on the heels of a high-schooler who shares a joint of hash with his friends before school," explains Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter. "For the law, he's a pusher. Following the case is young detective Cristi (Dragos Bucur), who has the uncompromising stubbornness of a hard-boiled hero, if none of the glamour.... Nothing, however, really develops in the film's hyper-realist world. Instead of uncovering a big drug ring, Cristi argues with his wife about misspelled words, and here lies the crux of the matter. The Romanian Academy decrees word spelling with the force of law. But what is the meaning of Law? Police? Consciousness? Does moral law exist?"

"A short, unsettling coda wraps up the entire film with the protagonist's practical application of the reductio ad absurdum principle, effectively cementing Porumboiu's status as one of the strongest contemporary Romanian or indeed European directors working today," declares Boyd van Hoeij in Cineuropa.

Update, 5/17: "No one-hit wonder, Porumboiou confirms the promise of both the new Romanian cinema and his own status as a burgeoning world-class auteur," writes Anthony Kaufman for indieWIRE. "It's the capricious nature of law, along with the fickle ways of language and meaning, that's really at issue in 'Police, Adjective' - as the film's title suggests, i.e. from Websters: 'Police (adjective) police power, police corruption, police state.'"

Updates, 5/18: "Further proof of the strength of the Romanian New Wave, this deadpan meditation on authority and moral conscience is playing out of the main competition, despite being one of the finest films at this year's festival," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Predicated on a series of routines and staged for maximum objectivity, 'Police, Adjective' has something of the deadpan theatricality that characterized early Jim Jarmusch," blogs J Hoberman for the Voice. "But the movie is also a deadly serious analysis of bureaucratic procedure and particularly (as presaged by the lengthy analysis of a pop song's lyrics and grammar put forth by the cop's schoolteacher wife), the tyranny of language. 'Police, Adjective' is the least violent movie I've seen at Cannes, but nothing has been more disturbing than the movie's final scene, in which the cop's superior uses a dictionary and a blackboard to parse the meanings of 'conscience' and 'police.' Images may record reality; words define it."

Update, 5/19: "The climax of 'Police, Adjective' contains as much explanation as the climax of 'Broken Embraces,'" notes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "The difference is that Almódovar uses explication as a means to a rather monotonous end. With Porumboiu, discourse breaks the film wide open and lifts it to greatness."

Update, 5/21: This is "easily the best film in Cannes not screening in the main competition," writes the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas.

Update, 5/22: "Whether 'Politist' mocks life reduced to rules and dead time or reduces it to rules and dead time itself is probably enough of a question to make the film a must-see: it can't do one without the other," writes David Phelps in The Auteurs' Notebook.

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Police, Adjective," 42kmfilm, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Corneliu Porumboiu, Dragos Bucur, Romanian Cinema