Procedural (CIFF 09)
Police work, taken as a whole, is boredom. Every now and then you make an arrest, but mostly there’s a lot of planning, bureaucracy, paperwork, procrastination. So maybe what Corneliu Porumboiu intends with POLICE, ADJECTIVE is to put all other films that’d dare to call themselves “procedurals” to shame; this is “police work” in the same sense that Pialat’s VAN GOGH is “art.” You remove the insecurity that drives a filmmaker to want to be “exciting,” and what you’re left with is a bunch of dour policemen shooting the shit and standing on street corners for hours at a time.
But there is, however, a peculiar excitement to Porumboiu’s film. What has been cut out, besides the usual business of crime or arrests, is the division between the subjects and the audience. There is an odd sensation to the film, as if we’re looking at the same things the characters are looking at and are experiencing the world the same way. Nearly every scene is constructed around this principle: before Dragos Bucur’s Cristi launches into his now-infamous dissection of the lyrics to Mirabela Dauer’s “Nu Te Parasesc Iubire,” the song is heard all the way through twice; when he reports that nothing happened during his stake-out, it’s only after we spend a good fifteen minutes watching that nothing happen; the ridiculousness of his boss asking his secretary to fetch a dictionary in the climax becomes even more obvious when we have to wait for several minutes for her to come back so that the conversation can be resumed.