Polițist, adjectiv

Victor here.

Last night we finally saw Polițist, adjectiv (Police, Adjective). It's a meditation on words, meaning and law, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu.

Sounds boring, doesn't it? But it's got chases (well, they're not really chases, it's just a policeman following a high school kid around the blocks in Vaslui), it's got suspense (solved by reading from a dictionary), it's got catchy music (a Mirabela Dauer song on Youtube repeated over and over), it's got drug dealers (well, just some teenagers smoking hash), it's got violence (some raised voices, at most).


Well, now you're sure it's boring. And yet, it's not. Take, for example, Cristi (the young policeman, played by Dragoș Bucur) shadowing the kids in the long takes that are so popular in the new Romanian movies. They're just walking through the streets, Cristi keeping his distance, so that sometimes they're not even in the frame at the same time. Yet there's always something happening to keep your interest, like children playing football, people passing by etc. Mr. Porumboiu doesn't hold your hand: your eyes have to scan the whole screen to see where the interesting things happen (unlike, say, Avatar, where 3D and depth of field meant that most of the time your eyes were forced to a single point of the screen).

Oh, what's the story, you ask? Well, the police got a tip from Alex about his friend Victor "offering" hash. Alex's sincerity seems doubtful and Cristi believes that light drugs will become legal anyway in a few years, so he's reluctant to arrest Victor. Unless he can prove that the drugs come from someone else, his boss, Anghelache (the wonderfully menacing Vlad Ivanov) will force him to make the arrest. And that's the suspense: will he be able to convince the boss (and the district attorney) that they shouldn't destroy that kid's future, or will he be forced to live with the burden?

As I said, in the end the answers are found in a dictionary. The climax has Cristi reading word definitions and the boss explaining them (the previous scene with Cristi and his wife discussing the meaning of the Mirabela Dauer song lyrics anticipates this). Anghelache's argument is, in my not so humble opinion, wrong: he says that "moral law" is a vague concept because it's not defined in the dictionary, and that a policeman's duty is to apply the state law. But first, there are lots of well-defined concepts not in the dictionary and second, what's the basis of the state law if not the moral law?

Would things have been different had Cristi been more skillful with words? (As he tells his wife, he's the kind of guy who doesn't understand why we use metaphors, why not just call the sea, sea, the fields, fields and so on?) Is a good heart enough to stop you from doing morally wrong things? Will they legalize weed? :)

As in all the some good movies, we get more questions than answers.