Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009): Romania

Reviewed by Zi Huang.  Viewed at the Mann Chinese Theater at AFI FEST 2009.

Before watching the film, I didn’t have too much expectation to the film because it’s a Romanian film of which I had never heard and I didn’t know anything about the directors and the actors. Nevertheless, I would start regarding the director Corneliu Porumboiu after screening the film because he made an incredible film that makes people think.

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.) is a very abnormal film that presents a normal detective’s normal life who handles a normal case. I say the film is abnormal because it is not shot like a film. Its ordinary and tedious cinematography probably has non-sense for some people, but it makes the film very close to the real life. I thought some people would feel boring and get up and leave when I watched the film in the Mann Chinese Theater, because it’s not as the traditional action genre for a polices verse criminals story as we expected. However, the audiences were very enjoyable watch this particularly slow film which also appealed to me.

I found many audiences liked this film because the film not only present a film or a story, but presented the life. The film makes people think afterwards. The story is so real relates to people’s conscience, social morality, and the law of the country. The detective follows a case and tracks a high school student suspect who may offer the drugs to other students. He has to make a decision whether makes the arrest which can ruin the student’s life. He struggles for that because he has developed personal conscience over the rigid law. The story makes me feel that, “wow, that’s the life!” In the life, we always have to make a decision follow between the personal conscience and the social morality to do something or not to do something.

The cinematography of the film is the most important thing affecting the film close to the real life. The director Cornerliu Porumboiu uses lots of long shots in the film. One long shot for the action; one long shot for a whole sequence; one long shot for the conversation over 5 minutes. The long tracking shots often capture one person in the frame, and then another one get into the frame after the first one walking away. They make me feel like that the detective is tracking the student, and we are tracking them. In addition, the director use a great number of eye angle shots instead of extreme close-up and interesting angle shot what are unusual in the film, but usual in life.

Police, Adjective presents what the director wants. Although it’s not kind of the mainstream film, I like it because it tells me that life is not a film and excitement cannot always come up and make sense in our life.