Police, Adjective

In vogue and rude health, Romanian cinema continues to flourish and Police, Adjective is a fine addition to its canon. It is a wry, contemplative anti-thriller about a provincial policeman and the moral dilemma he faces with his latest (relatively minor) case, in which a teenage student is suspected of supplying hashish to a couple of his friends. It deconstructs the police thriller with admirable patience, authenticity and wit, and, in the realist tradition of Stendhal, achieves that very difficult balance of conveying provincial boredom without ever boring the audience; we follow Cristi (an ironic anti-Messiah?) as if in real time: every low-key pursuit, every conversation at work, every form he has to fill in is presented to us. There's a lovely Godardian moment in a waiting room where Cristi and his colleague Belu sit in silence for a good three minutes while the matronly secretary types away on her computer. The climax of the film, a masterful subversion of the genre, is an intellectual shootout between Cristi and his chief inspector over the definitions of law and justice, with a dictionary the sole weapon. It is a slow film (the middle-aged couple sitting in front of us left about forty minutes in: I wonder what they were expecting?), but it is also bold, truthful, sweet, unusually compelling and permeated with an absurdist sense of humour so deliciously dry you could bottle it and serve it in El Bulli. A quirky, patient, cerebral delight.