Film Review — Police, Adjective

You know you are watching a film made outside the United States when nothing explodes, no one dies, overdoses, is kidnapped or even arrested. One is then made completely certain of this fact when they realize they are watching a police procedural and none of the above circumstances come about to rescue the script from oblivion. A similar feeling comes to the foray while watching Police, Adjective, the new film from acclaimed Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 to Bucharest), who has crafted a deceptively simplistic story that proves Eastern European filmmakers continue to deserve special attention in the annual festival circuit, if not the Academy's.

Cristi (Dragos Bucur), an undercover cop in dreary Vaslui, Romania begins to take his assignment of shadowing suspected pot dealer Victor (Radu Costin) a bit more seriously after realizing he is simply a kid getting an occasional high with some friends from school. Viewing the crime as hardly an injustice to society, Cristi drags out his investigation, consuming several days without even changing clothes, hoping to find evidence exonerating the teen. Unfortunately, said evidence never surfaces, and Cristi is forced to face his boss with an update on the investigation, as well as the realization that the whims of his conscience are insignificant in the eyes of the law.

The Dardenne Brothers of Belgium have mastered a modern form of neo-realism in films like The Son (2002) and most recently in Lorna's Silence (2009) that feature a high degree of moral uncertainty and internal debate among the protagonists over the fate of another human being, often a complete stranger, who is in a compromised situation. Porumboiu's use of minimalism in plot and dialogue — which makes the film seem like an adaptation of an introspective crime novel — proves to be successful here in visualizing Cristi's haphazard discovery of his own conscience, therefore replicating in a way the Dardennes' technique.

There is also room left over for a thin thread of dark comedy in Police, Adjective. When Cristi's underdeveloped vocabulary is put in check first by his wife, and then again by his boss, he seems relatively complacent rather than humiliated. Ultimately, his lesson is a simple reminder that an enforcer of the law has only the authority to uphold what the law says, not what the individual moral voice or popular sentiment might dictate.