Police, Adjective
The Dull Bits Left In
A film’s purpose is often to elaborate on a theme. Whether one does so hyperbolically or with understatement may or may not make much difference to its development. While some could insist that to do so without much action risks under-dramatising the story, to do so with too much of it risks burying the theme under needless events. When we wonder what a film is about, we can describe its narrative components or its thematic purpose. One might say it is about a person who takes over the family business and finds himself even more brutally removing rivals than his father ever did, as he eliminates enemies, former friends and family members. (The Godfather). Or it might be about someone whose niece is kidnapped and who devotes years of his life to finding her. (The Searchers) Here we would describe the story, but not quite explicate the theme. In the first instance, one might say it is about ambition and compromise, about an America where the gangster isn’t an aberration of US capitalism, but its apotheosis, with the family central to it. As Peter Cowie believed: ‘‘the notion of family as a paradigm for American capitalism – survival of the fittest, the ruthless annihilation of critics, and the amassing of money which in turn purchases power – emerges more and more forcefully as this film and its sequel gather momentum.’’ (Coppola) In The Searchers, it is about the development of civilisation, and that often those who might appear to be furthering it, like Nathan Edwards, who is determined to save his niece from ‘savages’, will instead be the very people who must be excluded from the community, as those violent urges will be of little use to a civilised environment. While no one will likely disagree with what the film is about narratively, some might contest its thematic purpose: a film’s theme is more intricate than the story, and often requires teasing out, and some interpretive leeway. Occasionally, a film’s plot offers this ambiguity – what did the young woman say to the film star she befriended in Japan in Lost in Translation; what were the two boys discussing in the closing shot of Hidden? Most of the time, we can describe the plot, while the theme we often interpret or uncover.
But if a film is of lasting value, it might rest on its story carrying its theme, and the risk is that the bigger the story, the more dramatised the events, the more intricate the storyline, all risk undermining the theme rather than elaborating it. One way of looking at contemporary European cinema is to see that it risks under-dramatisation, all the better to elaborate its thematic purpose. Force Majeur, The Child, Manderlay and Police, Adjective are all works that offer dramatic contraction over dramatic elaboration. In Force Majeur, a false avalanche reveals that the father promptly scarpers rather than trying to save his wife and kids. The avalanche is merely a snow cloud and of no risk to anyone, but it reveals an aspect of the central character’s personality he might have preferred hidden, and the film plays out the theme of fragile masculinity. The Child shows a young man who would prefer to sell his child than get a job, only to realise that when his partner collapses on her hearing the news that he must find a way to get the baby back. In Manderlay, black folk in the 20th century are belatedly emancipated from their slavery after a white saviour comes and tells them that the world has changed, and they need no longer be slaves. In all three, dramatisation is minimal (there is no avalanche; the child wasn’t kidnapped – he was given away; and the plantation is no more than a soundstage). It is as if the directors wished to contain the hyperbolic aspects of the story within the understated development of the theme.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, made in 2009, might seem to have hardly a story at all, and even the central character believes this to be so, as the entire film concerns a young cop’s reluctance to nail a schoolkid, Victor, for smoking a bit of hash. As Cristi (Dragos Bucur) says, ‘‘nowhere in Europe are you arrested for smoking a joint.’’ Yet, there he is, doing all the things that would be pertinent to a Hollywood cop movie: staking out the joint, following suspects, gathering evidence. But he does all this without binoculars, a car, a gun, or forensics. Instead, he appears more like a bloke mooching around, looking like he is spying on an ex-girlfriend or, ironically, like he might be a drug dealer himself. Anyone who spends too much time on street corners may just pass for the guilty, rather than an administrator of justice. When he pops into a shop next to his observation spot, the shop assistant says she saw him standing around the day before, and asks if something special is going on. He says he is keeping an eye on a hole in the ground, looking to make sure nobody steals some uninstalled parts. It would be as useless an operation as the one he has been assigned to, but it works as a mundane alibi for a mundane stakeout.
There is humour to be had in this dramaturgical deflation, in this narrative non-event, and Porumboiu isn’t afraid of apparently trivial explorations. In his earlier 12:08 Bucharest, a panel discusses where they were at the time of the Romanian revolution in 1989. People argue whether they were in the square before or after the time of the title, and the petty squabbling nevertheless contains very important claims. If you were there before, you were taking great risks as the Ceausescu regime had yet to fall; doing so afterwards, they weren’t part of a revolution – they were part of a celebration. The film has no interest in dramatising events that were enormously forceful, and no event more than the execution of the Ceausescus on Christmas day. It instead stays in the studio, as they work on the minutiae. In Police, Adjective, Porumboiu doesn’t only devote many minutes to the lowest level stakeouts and chase sequences (as Cristi follows people home), but he also has Cristi read passages from the dictionary. This comes late in the film when Cristi decides that he cannot see the point, purpose or ethical value in arresting this schoolkid who seems to have the odd joint and shares a toke with friends. The boy will face several years of prison, and Cristi says he won’t make the arrest. His boss insists he will, and reckons Cristi has no moral leg to stand on, as he forces the lad to read out various law terms from the dictionary. The boss, Anghelache (referred to as the Marlon Brando of New Romanian Cinema, Vlad Ivanov), is a pedant, but only when it suits him. When Cristi says that one of the definitions of the police includes: ‘’States or regimes which exercise control through repressive measures,’’ the boss insists this is ridiculous as he counters the very book he has relied upon to undermine his subordinate. The director manages to offer the most apparently trivial of scenes and yet contains within them the most pressing of definitional concerns. Who gets to lay down the law? Anghelache does, and uses the dictionary as a flimsy premise for claiming it is grounded in much more than personal prejudice. As long as he finds his own beliefs confirmed, the dictionary has validity. When it doesn’t, it becomes nonsense.
The cop with a conscience is often enveloped within a corrupt cop scenario, as in Internal Affairs, Prince of the City and Serpico. These are high-stakes outings that usually involve car chases and shoot-outs, and yet if the purpose is to develop the theme, then these may be components of the genre, but they aren’t always vital to the exploration of the corruption it uncovers and the crisis the cop undergoes. By removing full-blown corruption and leaving the crisis, Police, Adjective doesn’t just remove many of the action elements central to the type of film it ostensibly might seem to be, but as a consequence allows the crisis to appear in its most undiluted form. Instead of seeing Police, Adjective as undramatic, we can just as easily look at the cop movie as over-elaborated, in that the action gets in the way of thematic insistence. This is really the question: what does the film need to unravel most pertinently what it appears to be about on terms that aren’t only questions of plot. Internal Affairs wants to show a newcomer discovering his colleague in the LAPD is corrupt, and the film follows him as he eventually gets his man. Along the way, cops and informers are killed, including one man, who falls off a tall building as the film catches him in slow-mo freefall. Little is made of this moment, as if director Mike Figgis wanted it as no more than an action sequence and a plot point. As the man lies dying, the good cop manages to get vital information out of him.
If the corrupt cop movie often contains aspects of the cop in crisis, usually it isn’t the central focus, and Porumboiu removes the corruption all the better to play up the crisis, and to bring out other aspects that might get buried in a work that insists on thickening out the narrative, and inserting action set-pieces. Porumboiu says that while conceiving of the film, ‘‘He e-mailed 15 friends asking them to define conscience. The sheer variety of responses stunned him. ‘From that moment,’ he wrote by email, ‘the movie became one about language.’ At unexpected moments, Cristi and other characters linger over grammar. ‘I tried to find out what was hidden behind words, how words can be interpreted, and how they imply lots of different points of view.’’’ (Interview Magazine) Porumboiu doesn’t only take out action and corruption, he also wonders what a conscience consists of and how difficult it is to understand words that many films will take as a pre-emptive given. To focus on such an issue would risk slowing the material down, which is exactly what Police, Adjective insists upon as it seeks text and context over plot accumulation. It allows the film to explore not so much a corrupt system as a cop finds instances of injustice, but different systems that make the law inevitably relative rather than absolute. When Cristi was honeymooning in Prague, he would see people smoking hash on the street, and sees that other countries have far more lenient laws regarding this soft drug. Why put a teenager in jail for years when in other European countries, other post-communist countries, this needn’t be a criminal case at all? Cristi clearly feels he is wasting his time and police resources, and the crisis of conscience comes with a small dose of nationalist loathing (a preoccupation in many films of the Romanian New Wave) and probably a little self-loathing as well. While loitering with intent is usually an issue for the criminal, loitering without much intent is Cristis’s lot, standing around in the cold and looking like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Working off such a low level of narration, one may wonder if the viewer isn’t loitering without intent as well. But that would be to misconstrue the level of observation Porumboiu insists upon, as he allows us to comprehend the specifics of Bucharest society in the delineation of the three kids: the one accused of dealing, the buddy who has informed on him and claims they are no longer friends, and the girl who knows them both. In the opening scene, Cristi follows the young accused drug dealer to school, but to describe it thus would be to jump ahead of ourselves. What we see is a boy leaving an apartment, a man walking not far behind him, and, in time, we see the man seems to be following the boy. He stops when the kid arrives at the school. Yet throughout this scene, nothing formally indicates Cristi is following the lad: Porumboiu offers no point-of-view shots that would make this clear, and nor does he narrow down the world we see. Sometimes we have to pick out the two characters amongst various others as they near the school. The form doesn’t indicate this is a cop staking someone out, and we can’t even easily differentiate the boy and the cop. The policeman is wearing plain clothes, and isn’t that much older than the school kid: a point Cristi makes when meeting up with this informer, Alex, and the boy calls him sir. Cristi says he prefers he didn’t – he isn’t that old.
The film’s initial scene might be just one of the many that would make the film so tedious for some: David Kempler was far from alone in saying ‘‘Porumboiu is most determined to show us the boredom of being a detective and a big round of applause because he achieves what he has set out to demonstrate. Unfortunately for the audience, we are forced to witness the eternal ennui.’’ (BigPictureBigSound) But while it is often understandably argued that you don’t capture boredom on screen by replicating it, this isn’t quite what Porumboiu does. If it were so, we would have the same information as the character, and be bored for the same reasons. It is more viewers may find the film tedious, not because we share Cristi’s boredom, but because the film doesn’t share many a person’s expectations of how a viewer escapes it. Non-diegetic music, clear delineation between characters, point-of-view shots, and perhaps an opening scene that doesn’t start in media res, but with an expository one explaining what Cristi is doing, would all contribute to that escape from the tedious. But it would also risk involving the viewer a little too directly in a story that Porumboiu wishes to present as obliquely observational rather than narratively engaging. If the viewer is bored, it isn’t because Porumboiu has fallen into the fallacy of imitative form, but because the person watching has fallen into a category error. They are watching a film they expect, rather than the one the director has made.
Police, Adjective is about language, certainly, as we find when Cristi insists he doesn’t want to be called sir, in the dictionary definition of police, and also when he gets into a lengthy discussion with his wife, Anca, about linguistic questions She is listening to a pop song over and over again, and the exasperated Cristi asks her about it. She says it is using anaphora, a literary device based on repetition, as the singer sings about what the field would be without the flower, what today would be without the flower’’ and so on. Cristi says the song makes no sense as the singer says ‘‘life goes on’’, and Cristi asks, Can it go backwards?’’ Later, brushing his teeth, he says, What would toothpaste be without a toothbrush’’, as we hear her laughing offscreen.
But the film is equally about observation, as though indicating that if a movie is about a stakeout, then maybe it should involve the viewer in using some of its own attentive faculties. When Cristi starts by following Victor, what we notice isn’t the plot, since we don’t yet have one, but the environment. Victor lives in a typical communist-era flat, now a bit rundown and indicative surely of a modest standard of living. We notice this especially in contrast to Alex’s large house, which he later stands outside of as Cristi watches Alex coming home, his mother leaving, and the girl, Dana, arriving. Later, he follows Dana home, and she lives in as modest a dwelling as Victor. Cristi might be involved in a low-key drugs bust, but he will also be taking for granted what we recognise: a class division we are invited to observe, but that Cristi will have already been very much central to recognising.
Philip Kemp even wonders whether this class consciousness we notice is part of a class unconsciousness on Cristi’s part. ‘’There’s also a hint that Cristi is being swayed by class prejudice,’’ as Kemp says that, while Victor is the son of dairy workers, Alex’s father is an industrialist. We might also note that when describing Victor’s family and where they live, Cristi says he has a friend in the same building. Yet it isn’t that Cristi wants to nail Alex, who has done nothing wrong except snitch and smoke joints ‘supplied’ by Victor, but that Victor is far too small a fish to fry. Why wrap him in the batter of a lengthy prison sentence when he wonders if there is a much bigger story behind this minor one? Early on, he suspects it might be Victor’s brother who is dealing; later, he reckons it could be Dana’s brother. Records indicate the brother spends a lot of time going back and forth from Italy. It isn’t that Cristi doesn’t want to arrest Victor because of class prejudice; more, it would seem, because this could be a bigger case, and he wouldn’t then need to feel guilty about ruining people’s lives if they are big-time dealers, rather than just imprisoning a small-time hash smoker.
Like much of New Romanian Cinema, Police, Adjective is about pettiness and pedantry, inertia and bureaucracy, but just because it often focuses on the most mundane of events, this shouldn’t be taken as mundanity itself. Peter Bradshaw says it shows ‘‘modern Romania torpidly depressed in spirit, unable to jettison the toxic bureaucratic pedantry of the old regime.’’ Yet he seems to conflate what the film is about with how the film goes about it. He speaks of a ‘‘bizarrely over-extended scene’’, and of a country ‘’still drenched with the habits of a police state. This appears to be the point that Porumboiu is making, perhaps pedantically so, though the film is shot through with moments of black comedy.’’ (Guardian) The film is redeemed from its own tedium, Bradshaw believes, by the occasional bit of humour. But whether it is trying to get the title character in The Death of Mr Lazarescu into a hospital that will save his life, getting an abortion when it is illegal in Communist Romania, in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or determined to make sure your daughter passes an exam with outside help in Graduation, the new Romanian films insist on an observational acuity that allows us to understand two things: that we often have to work out who is who on the basis of hearing and overhearing, on seeing and surmising, and that the filmic space will be delineated based on a logic of inquiry, and not on immediacy. As Porumboiu says, on the latter point, “I need to see time in a film[…] Cinema is a time of the interior of the shot, a time of being, which of course is not the time of being. I prefer to deal with the rhythm of the shots like that, and that’s why we showed him following the suspect in real time.’’ (Sight and Sound)
In the context of the former one, in Police, Adjective, Anghelache is invoked early on, but we don’t see him until near the end of the film, long after we may have forgotten the specifics of the conversation where he is invoked. In Cristi Puiu’s Aurora, we have no idea why the central character is murdering various people until quite near the end of the film. We might think we are watching an irrational man, but instead we are watching an angrily motivated one. Vital to New Romanian Cinema is keeping us in the narrative dark and asking us to observe the light it happens to be shedding at any moment in time. When we see Alex’s family home, the house isn’t presented as an establishing shot, all the better to move on promptly with the story, but as a lengthy observational shot as we understand an aspect of Romanian class society, and also what looks like the duplicity of Alex and Dana in what might appear like a double deceit. Dana turns up after the mother leaves, and we might wonder if Victor knows that they seem to be seeing each other. When Cristi asks him if either Alex or Victor has a girlfriend, Alex says no. Is he telling the truth? Dana spends several hours in what seems like an empty house with Alex, but Porumboiu offers no interior shot to let us know for sure one way or the other. Yet it feels duplicitous, especially when we factor in Alex's squealing on Victor, and denying he has a girlfriend. Cristi’s colleague assumes that Alex betrayed his friend because of the girl. We might be inclined to agree, even if we don’t have enough evidence to conclude this is so, we have enough to make it pass for a plausible hypothesis. The film’s patient exploration of time’s rhythm allows for this combination of hesitation and assertion: of feeling we can say with some confidence what is going on, but without the certainty to know for sure that it is.
The film’s greatness rests partly on the room given to speculate with and beyond Cristi, and this is central to its relationship with boredom. Most New Romanian Cinema insists on scenes of the humdrum: the procedural process of bureaucracy and pedantry that would be removed from more insistent narrative throughlines, or heated up as categorical confrontations. (The sort of scene that would have a hospital secretary filling out a form while a son screams that their father is dying here.) But rather than necessarily viewing this as a dramatic failure, we can observe the film’s theme more completely. If drama is the carapace upon which a work envelops its thematic, then the risk is that while under-dramatising might leave the work feeling like no more than illustrating a point, overdramatising can bury the theme in spectacle. Hollywood’s insistence on drama means that the conceptual intrigue it generates gets quickly absorbed into the action it seeks to focus upon. Titanic, Saving Private Ryan and Thelma and Louise are all potentially films about what is missing from one’s life, past or present. But this becomes a theme so embedded in (very effective and efficient) action that it serves as a premise rather than a theme.
This is evident at its most extreme when Hollywood became preoccupied with a high concept, one that didn’t only bury the theme but also risks burying the story. Christopher Nolan admitted ‘‘You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all comprehensible.’’ (NME) Nolan may believe that he seeks productive ambiguity, but there is the ambiguousness of wondering what Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson say to each other at the end of Lost in Translation, and the ambiguity that leaves a viewer unable to follow certain plot threads. High concepts and over-elaborate events create a misplaced sense of priorities. Instead of a theme that is explored through the story, and that may demand elements of spectacle, it becomes a spectacle that risks undermining the story and obliterating the theme.
One might insist that all Porumboiu offers is a bloody-minded inversion of a Hollywood cop movie. Yet surely it is that he seeks to explore notions like oppression, language and the remnants of a dictatorial communist culture by proposing that power needn’t only be operative in corridors of immense institutions and large cities, but in small towns, ad hoc police stations and in the ruthless designation of words with the aid of a dictionary. He manages, like other Romanian films, to convey the seepage of power over its structures, the weakness of individuals rather than their strengths, the dutiful dullness of lives over their moments of excitement. Hitchcock may have said to Francois Truffaut, ‘‘What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out’’ (Hitchcock), in a formula that worked wonderfully well for the suspense maestro. But can a theme sometimes be best explored with the ostensible dull bits left in?
Milan Kundera, who differentiates theme from story so well, also speaks in another essay in the same book, The Art of the Novel, about the sort of bumbling bureaucratic ineptitude that can still ruin lives. During communism, a Czech engineer takes a trip to London, and finds, when he returns, the papers have reported he slandered the government, and he has decided to stay in the West. He goes to the editor of the paper responsible and tries to get it retracted (after all, there he is back in Czechoslovakia), but nothing can be done. His phone is tapped; he is followed. In time, he does the very thing that he had no interest in doing: he escapes the country. This story could be a Hitchcock film or a Porumboiu work, and while one might not be better than the other, it is likely that Porumboiu, by leaving the dull buts in, would probably be much better at capturing that seepage: the dull, dry rot of a regime whose greatest evil is incompetence and petty vindictiveness, a casual cruelty barely registered, and yet constantly present. As Porumboiu says, ‘‘It’s easy to blame Ceausescu, but he couldn’t have succeeded without finding something in each one of us.’’ (Sight and Sound) New Romanian Cinema often explores this lesser evil and demands the de-dramatisation of form to find it.
© Tony McKibbin