Police, Adjective

Corneliu Porumboiu's second feature follows, at something close to real time, a young policeman assigned to tail a high school student who smokes hash. Cristi knows that filing the report will put the boy away for years, and he believes Romania will soon bring the law into line with the rest of Europe. His captain is interested only in what the law says today. The tension comes from waiting rather than pursuit: a man standing in a street studying a patch of spit, cold soup, forms being filled in. Then, in the final stretch, a dictionary arrives on the captain's desk and the definitions of conscience, justice, morality and police are read aloud for roughly twenty minutes. The state does not refute Cristi's objection. It confiscates the words he built it from. The joke is in the title itself, since police is a noun in Romanian too, never an adjective. The film took the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2009. Who it is for: viewers ready for the slow, institutional, language-obsessed Romanian New Wave. Who it is not for: anyone wanting procedural momentum, plot, or resolution.