This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 4, 2010 - The visually striking but maddeningly slow new Romanian movie "Police, Adjective" concerns itself with a policeman named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and his surveillance of a high-school student who gets together with his buddies on a schoolyard to smoke hashish. One of the buddies, it turns out, has informed the police that the student is connected to a big dope ring. After lengthy - and I mean lengthy - surveillance, Cristi decides that "The Squealer," as he calls the would-be informant, is just trying to get the student out of the way for a few years so he can make a move on his girlfriend.
Cristi keeps trying not to arrest the student, figuring that fairly soon Romania will follow the lead of most of the rest of Europe and decriminalize the simple possession of cannabis. He is trying to avoid sending the kid to prison for several years and screwing up his life. His chief, however, wants a bust.
Large chunks of the movie - an hour or more out of a little under two hours - consist of Cristi watching and following the student and his friends. The surveillance goes on for so long over such a limited landscape that we come to recognize landmarks.
The landmarks are visually arresting - director Cornelius Poromboiu has a painterly eye, and in some cases perhaps a painterly brush as well - and there are beautiful following shots that are meticulously timed and framed. But a movie needs to be more than a series of striking images. Even if the filmmaker is trying to convey the boredom and sameness of much police work, after a while we just need something to happen. Most of the way through, very little does, except for a mildly amusing conversation about metaphor and meaning between the policeman and his wife.
Then, finally, in the last 15 minutes or so, we reach a denouement, in a meeting in the chief's office. What happens is a comic debate on just what it is that policemen do in a theoretically free society, as Romania has been for a couple of decades, as opposed to what policemen do in a police state.
Much of the argument has to do with the meaning of words, particularly the word "police," and at one point a dictionary is introduced into the discussion. The phrase "police state" is cited as one way that "police" can be used as an adjective. That may help explain the title. Or not.
The visual brilliance of "Police, Adjective" is particularly demonstrated in this bi-laterally symmetrical final scene, which appears to be a four-way conversation between three policemen and a bowl of fruit.
Like that image, the conversation - essentially, about the difference between the law and justice, between following the rules and doing the right thing - is both perfectly rational and completely absurd. It provides a payoff, but I'm not sure it is worth the wait.
Harper Barnes is a freelance journalist who has long written about film.