Police, Adjective. Becomes a Noun

by John Villeneuve
Awards Daily contributing writer

Much like its title, Police, Adjective. is a kind of pastiche broken up into a series of linguistic challenges, resulting in a revitalized, yet, comic perception of the world around us. Our protagonist is a cop who’s mandate is to observe a young, alleged, petty marihuana dealer, a task which the cop thinks is a silly waste of time considering the relative benignity of this dubious criminal act. Moreover, the cop (Dragos Bucur) sees the writing on the wall as the rest of Europe seems to be moving forward, giving less credence to the illegality and dangers of marihuana. However, he cannot convince his superior of this evolution. and is ordered to continue the fruitless stakeout. In essence, he is trapped inside a whimsical paradox.

Much of the humor, here, is in the questions that the film asks. What is the duty of a cop? Is obeisance to an ideology, absurd? What laws are just or simply outdated? Are rules negated as a result of the passage of time? What constitutes art when considering popular music? Is culture a moveable feast? Pondering such questions, the director (Corneliu Porumboiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest) successfully exercises a kind of alchemy, turning the mundane into comic gold. To the cop’s superior (Vlad Ivanov, in a acutely funny performance considering he was the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), a crime is a crime because it is written as such on paper; and until some politician says otherwise, it remains a crime. For the cop’s wife, a popular song on the radio is worthy of respect even though the lyrics are insipid and intellectually bovine. To her, the song’s merit lies in it’s universal truths that speak across cultures. But, for our hapless cop, these dialectal arguments are ultimately a wall against progress, and an insult to common sense. That said, for this viewer, Porumboiu’s audacious and pungent film is Swiftian satire at its best.

Stylistically, Porumboiu has a lot in common with a growing number of directors who have adopted a considerably less frantic pace in filmmaking, such as Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention), Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season, Lake Tahoe), Crisit Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export, Dog Days) and Otar losseliani (Gardens of Autumn). The product from these particular auteurs is what you would get if you mixed Jacques Tati and early Woody Allen in a bouillabaisse soup. Eschewing the attention deficit type of editing, close ups, and gravity of tone, Porumboiu adopts a purer type of cinema, like his contemporaries, all the while embracing the visually uncluttered mise-en-sc√®ne and wit of the masters. That much of this type of cinema is coming from Eastern Europe is not a validation of memes, but, rather, a collective stretching of the arms after a long sleep in the embrace of stasis and totalitarianism. Hence, insight is delivered organically and, yet, with a multitude of contradictory axioms. And, on the basis of the farcical linguistic banter and burlesque in Police, Adjective., I could not help but remember Woody Allen’s, Love and Death, where Diane Keaton divides between her and Jessica Harper, their lover’s letters, one keeping the vowels, the other the consonants.

Ultimately, Police, Adjective. is a continuation of a style that is growing in cinema. It demonstrates how the static shot can be revelatory, and words are the harbingers of probity and invention. Revealing the absurd, I hope, is becoming cool again, because all of the histrionics on display in lazy, leave-your-brain-at-the-door, popular cinema may have some reality in it (much like reality television), but it takes a surgeon to find the malignancy and the truth. Corneliu Porumboiu is decidedly up to the task. So let’s hope the academy sees his scalpel, not as an adjective, but as a noun; in other words, as an Oscar nominee.