Going against the grain of the clichéd cop movie filled with violence, car chases and loud noises, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009), is an intelligent and thought-provoking piece of Romanian cinema that examines the concepts of law, morals, linguistics and dialectics.
The story follows Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young plainclothes detective assigned to track a teenager who occasionally smokes hash outside his school with his friends. Aware that the kid isn’t exactly Pablo Escobar, Cristi is torn between doing his job and doing what’s right. While the teenager’s arrest could lead to the source of the drugs, Cristi knows that it could also result in up to a seven-year jail sentence for the teenager who, in Cristi’s eyes, is only …show more content…
As his colleague is bad at football, Cristi deduces that he will also be bad at tennis-football, his conclusion based in simple black and white terms. Cristi’s direct and obdurate attitude is again highlighted in his discussion with his wife about the metaphors and symbolism of a song’s lyrics – why can’t they just say what they mean? Towards the end of the film, in a fantastic scene underscored by its simplicity, this mindset is challenged when Cristi’s conscience is at odds with carrying out the arrest of the teenager. His by the book captain (with the book in this case being a dictionary) informs Cristi that his job is to enforce the law, not make decisions based on his feelings. On the face of it this scene, executed with subtle deadpan humour, is seemingly only dealing with nothing more than the pedantry of the language police and chain of command bureaucracy. For a post-communist country living in the slowly diminishing shadow of its past stained with the brutality of a dictatorship, this scene strikes a significant chord as it poses the question – when a law isn’t governed by what is right and just then when does it become
The story follows Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young plainclothes detective assigned to track a teenager who occasionally smokes hash outside his school with his friends. Aware that the kid isn’t exactly Pablo Escobar, Cristi is torn between doing his job and doing what’s right. While the teenager’s arrest could lead to the source of the drugs, Cristi knows that it could also result in up to a seven-year jail sentence for the teenager who, in Cristi’s eyes, is only …show more content…
As his colleague is bad at football, Cristi deduces that he will also be bad at tennis-football, his conclusion based in simple black and white terms. Cristi’s direct and obdurate attitude is again highlighted in his discussion with his wife about the metaphors and symbolism of a song’s lyrics – why can’t they just say what they mean? Towards the end of the film, in a fantastic scene underscored by its simplicity, this mindset is challenged when Cristi’s conscience is at odds with carrying out the arrest of the teenager. His by the book captain (with the book in this case being a dictionary) informs Cristi that his job is to enforce the law, not make decisions based on his feelings. On the face of it this scene, executed with subtle deadpan humour, is seemingly only dealing with nothing more than the pedantry of the language police and chain of command bureaucracy. For a post-communist country living in the slowly diminishing shadow of its past stained with the brutality of a dictatorship, this scene strikes a significant chord as it poses the question – when a law isn’t governed by what is right and just then when does it become