Police, Adjective
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 1.0
Fantastic, just fantastic: a police procedural with aspirations to be a tract on dialectics (which, admittedly, is more fun when it's accompanied by kung fu, like in Can Dialectics Break Bricks?). Three teens smoke pot by a kindergarten and the Romanian Police spazz out, with detective Dragos Bucur in cold pursuit - his own moral compass says it's no big deal since weed should be legal, but his superiors disagree, and before you know it, the SWAT Team is being assembled. What I, at first, thought was a critique of dubious policing strategies - why aren't they going after 'real criminals' and wouldn't it be a hoot if, while they're going after petty nonsense, something 'bad' actually happens? - becomes this incredibly dry dissertation on What Words Mean accompanied by (arthouse) images of the mundane (smoking, eating soup, walking) to remind the audience how tedious life can be. We don't need more faux-Godards.
