Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film, Politist, adj (Police, Adjective), now playing at the IFC Center, explores the ways in which language operates as a source of authority via the narrative of an individual conscience set against a small-town Romanian bureaucracy. Set amidst a decaying post-Soviet urban landscape, the story follows a young police detective named Cristi who is assigned to investigate a group of teenagers suspected of using hashish. Caught between his professional obligation to uphold the law and his moral reluctance to mar the record of a vaguely wayward youth, we watch Cristi negotiate his personal beliefs within the context of an oppressive and didactic system of law enforcement .

We accompany the detective, thoughtfully portrayed by Dragos Bucur, over two days as he trails his main suspect, attempting to build sufficient evidence in his defense and avoiding a sting operation that would land the youth in jail. His reluctance towards the law in question isolates him from his colleagues and quickly establishes him as an outsider. Unable to orchestrate a sting operation with a free conscience, he avoids reporting to his captain and withdraws from his fellow employees. Several times, he expresses his belief that Romanian drug laws will change in a few years, citing his observations of such relaxed attitudes in the Czech Republic, where citizens are allowed to smoke in the streets. This international perspective, coupled with a strong fidelity to his own values, puts him in ideological opposition to his native government. It is a familiar conundrum, but one that resounds here with poignancy and wit.

Marked by long passages that show Cristi walking, eating, smoking, and waiting while he carries out his assignment, Porumboiu’s filmmaking celebrates the quotidian while simultaneously isolating his subject within the psychology of his increasing solitude. In a particularly compelling and hilarious moment, we see him eating dinner alone in the kitchen of his apartment while his wife plays a popular love song from the other room. It blares loudly into the kitchen (his pleas for her to turn the music down remain unheeded) as he shovels food into his mouth in a gesture of desperate self-preservation. The use of diagetic sound as the sole accompaniment anchors us in the details of the Cris’ everyday existence and he quickly garners our empathy.

The extended cinematic description is juxtaposed with dialogue that examines the nature of language itself, and it is here that we see the film’s central theme emerge. In a final confrontation between Cristi and his boss, the formidable police captain Anghelache, the latter condescendingly doles out a lesson in semantics. After explaining that it is ultimately his conscience that prevents him from arresting the teenagers, Cristi is instructed to offer his definition of this word. His reply, “Conscience is something within me that prevents me from doing something bad that I’d afterwards regret,” is compared with the definition found in a Romanian dictionary, from which Cristi is forced to read. Further definitions are read aloud: law, moral, police. The scene is shot in a single long take, with several smaller cuts added for narrative continuity. Its sardonic, deadpan humor rings with situational irony, and it becomes hard not to laugh at the ridiculousness of the scenario.

Beneath the scene’s cutting irony lies a subtle investigation of language’s relationship to power. Here, law enforcement’s strict adherence to the letter of the law rehearses the reliance of authority on language as a source of power. We see power derived directly from linguistic definition, delimiting itself according to the dictionary’s prescriptive code. Accordingly, each police officer must be the definition of a law enforcement official, and each offense of the law must be treated precisely as such. If language can here be read as an allegory of state power, then the act of definition performs as a metaphor for the law, delineating rules about how this society uses words much the way that laws demarcate boundaries of human behavior.

Porumboiu here suggests that the state’s obsession with semantics is symptomatic of the impoverishment of its ruling ideology. To the extent that this semantic rigidity permeates every level of legal offense, the system is revealed as vulnerable, even broken, and the film subsequently begins to emerge as an examination of such endemic disability. Crumbling urban infrastructure frames Cristi as we follow him throughout his day. Graffiti litters decaying concrete walls and deep potholes speckle the roads. Even the technology within the government offices seems on the verge of collapse. A mammoth-sized computer sits unused next to Cristi as we watch him hand-write his police reports. The dispassionate attitudes of his fellow government workers, who seem vaguely disinclined to help him execute background checks that could potentially exonerate his suspects, similarly illuminate such dysfunction. Caught within the mechanics of a dilapidated system, they have become too preoccupied with meeting friends for coffee or performing their own rote administrative functions to be fully effective.

The form and subject matter of Police, Adjective arguably recalls Bruno Dumont’s 1999 film L’Humanité, wherein a police detective’s investigation of a horrific crime consequently illuminates his struggle with the limits of human understanding. Set in a small village in Northern France, the film similarly employs long shots and relies exclusively on diagetic sound to explore a psyche perched on the verge of disillusion. Porumboiu’s film departs from Dumont’s, however, in its overall lightness of tone. Beneath the strict formal surface of Police, Adjective lies a sardonic playfulness that makes it extermely enjoyable to watch. It is to this extent that the film can be read as a deadpan parody of the traditional police genre, as its self-referential title indicates. Porumboiu seems to suggest that irony’s subtle fluidity can perform as a counter-discourse, and he constructs the film’s tone as a vehicle for such delicate subversion. Ultimately, Porumboiu offers us a darkly humorous look at the relationship between linguistic and political structures, one that cuts to the core of how we operate as individuals within these shifting, dominant systems. Presented with such complicated negotiations, we can certainly hope to find solace in the nuance of irony, as Porumboiu suggests.

Police, Adjective at IFC

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