Review of Police, Adjective (2010) by Mike M — 02 Oct 2010

At one point, the camera follows Cristi as he nips home for lunch, whereupon the cop sits down to enjoy some warming soup. (I think it was chicken, but I couldn't be sure.) We are reminded of how, in dramatising the absurd lengths to which the bureaucratic regime of old (and, apparently, its contemporary equivalent) would go, the Romanian New Wave has sometimes lapsed into pointscoring pedantry itself: I was all right with the soup, but checked out a little mentally when Porumboiu obliged us to watch Cristi having his tea, from which the only thing there is to be gained is an appreciation of the cop's functional table manners.

.. There arises a tricky strain of didacticism: it may be key that the cop's girlfriend is a teacher, his targets of high-school age, his chief informant apt to dash off to do his homework, and that the whole thing concludes with a (in the circumstances, reasonably amusing) half-hour dialectics lesson, complete with chalk and blackboard, given in the police chief's office-cum-classroom on the subject of the individual's needs versus those of the state.

It's less an intrigue than an exercise: if not a punishment, exactly ("I WILL NOT PLAY TO THE CHEAP SEATS" written out once every minute for 110 minutes), then a project undertaken by a nation still struggling to define itself, with its cinema as with any other language.