Police, Adjective

City Paper Grade: B-

by Sam Adams

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: B- ]

Corneliu Porumboiu's follow-up to 12:08 East of Bucharest follows Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a Romanian police detective, as he investigates a series of minor crimes. And for much of the movie, that's all it does, shadowing him as he stands watch outside the house of a teenager who may or may not be guilty of passing hash to two of his classmates. As he pursues the case, on orders from his superior (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' Vlad Ivanov), the detective begins to doubt not only his suspect's guilt but the morality of the law criminalizing his offense. Like 12:08, whose Romanian title translates as Was There a Revolution or Not?, Police, Adjective is preoccupied with definitions, specifically the way they not only reflect meaning but create it, as well. At home, Cristi and his teacher girlfriend debate the proper use of negative pronominal adjectives, while his work is informed by the interpretation of laws as well as his understanding of the duties of his office. Porumboiu is onto an interesting subject, but he hasn't bothered to devise a story to go along with it. The sequences of Cristi performing surveillance duty go on long after they've made their point, and a point is all they have to make. He's merely using duration to convey duration, boredom to convey boredom, a clumsy one-to-one correspondence that leaves little room for engagement. The movie could have easily been called Concept, Belabored. Eventually, Ivanov's character pulls out a dictionary and essentially recites the film's thesis, which is apparently meant to retroactively impose meaning on the dull and uninflected sequences that precede it. The film's blank longueurs are vacant spaces waiting to be filled — or, perhaps more to the point, vague babble in urgent need of translation.