Police, Adjective
This entry was posted on February 6, 2010 at 2:20 pm, filed under arts & crafts and tagged cinema, Corneliu Porumboiu, IFFR2010, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Romania. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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Hi, my name is Florian Schroiff, I live and work in the beautiful city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. This website is mostly a collection of the various flotsam and jetsam I encounter on my travels through the web.
One Comment
Strange that there is a gun on the poster. OK, the film is about the concept “pen mightier than sword”, I get it.
“Police, Adjective” is a dry observation of a number of days in the life of Romanian police officer Christi who is in pursuit of three kids that meet after school to smoke some grass.
Christi does not like the idea to have to put one of them behind bars for breaking Romania’s draconic drugs laws, so he tries to convince his superiors to not take any action. Apparently puffing a joint in Romania is enough to put you in jail for 3 and a half years.
The title already gives a hint that language is important in this film. The rigid text of the law, the vague surveillance reports Christi writes. In one scene he has a discussion with his wife, a teacher, about the lyrics to a love song she likes.
The film moves very slowly, a lot of pursuit on foot, a lot of waiting. In the big showdown between Christi and the police chief the chief makes his subordinate read aloud from a dictionary to clearly define the concepts that Christi struggles so vaguely against.