Police Adjective

Long and tiresome is how I would describe Romania’s official submission to the 82^nd Academy Awards Foreign Language section in 2010. Police Adjective (2009) directed by Cornelus Porumboiu and starring Dragos Bucur, recently seen in Peter Weirs The Way Back (2010) and also had a role in the award winning Romanian movie The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) another rather long winded affair.

A Romanian plain-clothes police officer suffers a crisis of conscience when he is assigned a case to gather evidence about a young student who is suspected of dabbling with soft drugs. Arguing for leniency to be shown towards the student as his only real crime is youthful irresponsibility, but his superiors have a very different moral standard from his own more common sense approach. For those that expect a car chase, the odd sighting of a gun, perhaps a victim or two and maybe even an arrest you’re out of luck. The main protagonist spends long periods of time just standing around observing his perp not saying very much at all in fact the film does not boast a great deal of dialogue! The “action” takes place in the director’s hometown Vaslui a provincial town in the north west of the country. This critically well-received film has been described as “blackly humorous” black maybe, humorous no.