By Virginia Wright Wexman
AFI FEST Daily News

“I had in mind a labyrinth,” says Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, speaking of his new film POLICE, ADJECTIVE. “The detective must wend his way along many different paths.”

In part, the image of the labyrinth describes the professional life of the movie’s policeman hero, Cristi (Dragos Bucur), whose work involves tailing a marijuana-smoking teenager. “Cristi his good at his job; he does it well,” Porumboiu explained in an interview given in conjunction with the film’s screening at AFI FEST. “He is a hunter. He is following someone. But he is also being followed—by the camera.”

The crime Cristi is investigating is a petty one and, as the film makes clear, soon may no longer be illegal in Romania. Nonetheless, Cristi must spend long hours watching and waiting as he attempts to formulate his case. The film’s painstaking documentation of these tedious activities in lengthy scenes bereft of dialogue or musical cues gave rise to objections on the part of some critics. But the director defends his strategy. “I wanted to describe the rhythm of Cristi’s life,” he states. “The frustrations, the patience required.”

Some of the frustrations Cristi endures are part and parcel of the holdover Communist mentality that still dominates modern Romanian society. Seemingly endless bureaucratic snags continually bog down his investigation: voluminous paperwork, indifferent government functionaries. In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece, British political theorist Timothy Garton-Ash argued that life in Eastern European has been irrevocably altered as a result of the post-1989 collapse of the Soviet Union. But a look at the films made by Porumboiu and other members of the Romanian New Wave belies this view. Cristi Puiu’s 2005 THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU portrays a bureaucracy-clogged Romanian health system more dysfunctional than that of the United States, while Cristian Mungiu’s bleak 2007 abortion drama 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS is the first of a projected series dealing with the horrors of life in Romania during the 1980s. Porumboiu’s own 2006 comedy 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST focuses on an ineptly-mounted local TV talk show broadcast in the director’s dilapidated home town of Vaslui, a provincial city in the eastern part of the country. Each of these films—all honored with top awards at Cannes—portrays a desolate world in which there is little space for hope.

These Romanian dystopias feature moldering structures leftover from the Communist era which create cityscapes of mind-numbing monotony. In POLICE, ADJECTIVE the dismal byways of Vaslui seem especially labyrinthine because they are all so similar. Early in the film during a conversation about Romania’s recent entry into the European Union, one character voices the wildly improbable hope that Vaslui could become a tourist attraction, a “little Prague” he says. Not likely!

This conversation points in other directions too, for the most treacherous labyrinths created in POLICE, ADJECTIVE are not geographical but linguistic. The movie’s title signals this pre-occupation. “In Romania, we have a type of story called a police procedural, so in that genre, the word ‘police’ functions as an adjective,” explains Porumboiu. “Also, Cristi’s job requires him to act as an intermediary who carries out the policies specified in the laws of the country. And, of course, the film is about language, so the title has this meaning as well.”

In this spirit, virtually every conversation in the film, be it about sports or popular music, is built around the slippery shoals of language. Lurking behind these exchanges is the shadow of the conceptual abyss underlying all linguistic communication. This chasm comes to the fore in the movie’s final scene, a tour-de-force in which a dictionary plays the main role. Here it becomes clear that the refusal to buy into the socially accepted meanings of words—however arbitrary they may seem—condemns one to solipsism and despair. The job of a policeman, even if it involves traversing endless labyrinths again and again, acts as a ballast against such despair.

But despair is not the ultimate message of Porumboiu’s film, for subtle humor creates a gently whimsical mood that cuts across the story’s darker themes. In its twin preoccupations with an empty world and linguistic play, POLICE, ADJECTIVE marks Porumboiu as an artistic descendent of his countryman Eugene Ionesco. In Porumboiu’s films the traditions of Absurdist theater live on. “We Romanians have a taste for the absurd,” the director says.

Virginia Wright Wexman is the author of A History of Film and other books on cinema.