Police, Adjective (2009)

Romania

3.5*
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Screenwriter: Corneliu Porumboiu
Director of Photography: 
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 min

Original title: Poliţist, Adjectiv

Cristi is a policeman, but he does not have the kind of life we have come to associate, through the American film industry, with the cop genre. He has been assigned to a case of teenage marijuana consumption, and by the looks of things, this is going to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. The opening scene consists of Cristi following a teenage boy between his school and his home. Perhaps another film would have created some mystery about Cristi’s intentions – I’m thinking of the Dardennes brothers’ The Son (le Fils). But Cristi’s lack of self-consciousness indicates that he has probably done this kind of thing before and that he is very likely a policeman.

Our suspicions are confirmed in the following scene, at a meeting between him and one of his superiors. This is also one of the rare times that Cristi, whose face is generally expressionless, betrays any emotion. He has been following the teenage boy and his friends for a while, and has dutifully written up and submitted his detailed reports, but he finds the mission rather senseless, since no other country in Europe would prosecute anybody for smoking marijuana. He suggests they go after a friend, who might be a dealer, but his superior dismisses his suggestion.

The rest of the film contains many more scenes, often filmed in long takes, of Cristi tailing one of the schoolchildren. Sometimes he is lucky: they smoke something and he gets to recover the butt, to determine whether it was tobacco or marijuana. But more often than not, he just notes down a vehicle registration number or a visitor’s times of arrival and departure.

As far as long takes are concerned, the film seems to have a Tarr-esque obsession with recording the passage of time, and in two scenes director Corneliu Porumboiu films actor Dragoş Bucur, who plays Cristi, eating alone at his small kitchen table. The one takes place in complete silence, the other is accompanied by the very bad music (“Nu te părăsesc iubire” by Mirabela Dauer) played on youtube by Cristi’s wife, with whom he is clearly not very enamoured. And we are not much taken with her either, given her choice of song and her choice to repeat the song ad nauseam.

The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise about the use of language. This film is, by no means, the kind of film one has in mind when thinking of a “police film”, which demonstrates the conventional use of “police” as an adjective, but which this film does not exemplify. So what? The scenes showing Cristi’s anxiety at challenging the status quo, namely his superiors, are infinitely more illuminating, and constitute the only real points of dramatic interest in this film.

The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006)

Romania

3.5*
Director: Cătălin Mitulescu
Screenwriters: 
Cătălin Mitulescu, Andreea Valean
Director of Photography:
Marius Panduru

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title:
Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii

By the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decades-long reign, the ruthless Romanian dictator, who had inspired fear in his people, was a laughing stock and while most people showed reverence to him in public, he was the object of ridicule in private.

Director Cătălin Mitulescu’s debut film, one of the gems of the Romanian New Wave, gives us a glimpse of life under the bereted leader – who, in an hilarious opening scene, snatches a large block of cheese from a school boy because he hasn’t teethed yet. This boy, Lali – short for Lalalilu - should have been the focus of the film. If this were the case, this could easily have been one of the finest films of the Romanian New Wave. The boy is cute and curious, with a natural acting ability, and has none of the contrivances of so many performances by child actors.

But we don’t get him in the lead. Instead, what we are left with is a very patchy storyline with Eva, Lali’s older sister, who, in her final year of high school, has to choose between Alex, the slightly rebellious but well-intentioned son of a high-raking communist party official, and Andrei, a boy whose ingenuity makes up for his looks. In one of the best scenes of the film, Alex knocks over a bust of Ceaușescu at his and Eva’s school; when they are both discovered at the scene of the crime, they are expelled and sent to a technical school outside the city.

There are interesting bits of narrative here and there – in particular, the plan hatched by Andrei to escape with Eva across the Danube, and their preparations for this adventure – but often the motivations are not well established and when it transpires that Andrei and Eva are not on the same page when they find themselves halfway across the river in the middle of the night, the change of heart is left unexplained.

The film offers a nice sketch of the last year of Ceaușescan Romania, where regular power cuts and a general lack of rations are the order of the day, and the political situation is not the focus of the film. Fair enough. But Eva’s character arc is difficult to grasp, while her brother Lali’s adventurous spirit (he even has a plan to assassinate the country’s leader, but his plans fall apart when the revolution arrives) makes for arresting viewing. I would have liked a more coherent storyline for Eva, but as a first-time director, Mitulescu has staged his film very competently.