Police, Adjective (2010)

it may be a Rubick cube - for each viewer a face. or portrait of Romanian reality. it can be boring or extraordinary. it can be slice of bread or cake. but, in fact, important fact is its existence. dark, strange, complicated because it is very simple. a film about rights and force and jail silhouette of words. about duty, sin and the role of man as small piece of large clock.result - an extraordinary movie about facts, freedom and pressure. a great script meets an excellent cast. axis - vision of a very interesting director. and courage to make a film like a parable or mirror. the performance of Dragoș Bucur can not be a surprise. only new part of a way to define a remarkable actor. and a cinema from East in search of its identity. must see it ! scene by scene. for understand a world. or, only, for discover roots of yourself.

After watching this movie that currently has a IMDb rating of 7.0, all I can ask is "you're kidding, right?" Are things so bad in Romania that this passes for entertainment? I hope that I'm not giving anything away, but there is a scene where the lead character was eating soup for about five minutes or so, alone and in silence, except for the sounds of his slurping the soup. Not exactly what I would call exciting police action. Watching him trail a couple of kids over and over again through the streets on foot didn't exactly have me on the edge of my seat either. Watching him waiting outside of his boss's office for several minutes while his partner reads the paper and the secretary is typing on her computer keyboard and clicking the mouse...not good either. (I hope I didn't ruin it for anyone.)Where exactly was the scene or scenes in this movie that influenced so many people to rate the movie so highly? Am I just not sophisticated enough to see the genius in this movie? You could easily find standing in a line at the DMV, waiting in your doctor's office while he's running 45 minutes late, or being caught in a two hour traffic jam during a snowstorm to be just as entertaining.

This is a film about a policeman and a matter of conscience. There's a circle of three friends, two boys and a girl, one boy has denounced the other boy to the police for supplying marijuana, it appears that this is so he can have the girl to himself. Our policeman, Cristi is being pressed to slap the cuffs on the kid by his superior, the charge is a life-wrecker, seven years in prison for smoking joints at lunch break. Cristi spends the movie trying to avoid this outcome. As he says, it's a foolish law.Cristi is pushing against a bureaucracy that simply doesn't care, and ends up looking like a fool when he talks to people who are more educated with him, for example suffering his girlfriend's overanalysis of a ludicrous ballad, or the pseudo-dialectics of his boss, a masterpiece of sophistry. The point is that language or words often constitute another form of aggression, as the Athenians knew, you can win any argument once you have mastered rhetoric. Of course, as soon as anyone raises their voice or gets upset, this is taken as a sign that they've lost the argument, the intellectual warfare, losing having nothing whatsoever to do with being right or wrong of course.The film is about conscience, something that totalitarian societies tried to eliminate in favour of the wisdom of the law. Good film although some of the intricacies of the discussions were lost on me not being a Romanian, and unable to follow the thread of Romanian spelling and grammar.I actually loved the movie on an aesthetic level, I doubt it was intentional, but I always pick up on dashes of yellow in visual arts, an eccentricity of mine. For example in the street where the kid under surveillance lives, all the utilities pipes that come out onto the street are painted bright yellow, the young girl appears first wearing a bright yellow top under denim, and Cristi uses a yellow lighter and a yellow pen, most of the rest of the colour in the movie is very dull and subdued, I enjoyed these flashes. It's also nice seeing old communist offices, nowadays in the west everything is open plan and new, no-one has offices except the capo di tutti capi. Here there's peeling plaster, old caved in lockers, and a little peace and quiet. Hell I even liked just seeing Cristi sat down eating. Then there's the formal way where letters and plans are just shown on the screen with no background. I like the style of the police reports.I would just point out that based on my understanding of the film, the English title is a mistranslation, politist is like the French word policier, which all we can translate as is "police procedural"; another translation is "policeman". The translations are nouns though so I was a little confused as to why it's being referred to as an adjective. Maybe the error is meaningful?

The Romanian film wonder goes on and what's wonderous about it is that it's not afraid of life, like most movies around the world are. Since the beginning of the 1900s, there's an agreement about that life being absolutely boring. Lucky thing you can cut the film.But here, we follow the young policeman on a routine mission, trying to investigate a supposed drug crime. The camera goes on for ten minutes, nothing happens or more likely...everything happens. What's morality about. Following the law or following your conscience? Or is it the same thing? Or should it be? An action drama there the action takes place inside the characters and the viewers. And that's absolutely fair enough.