Questions of New Romanian Cinema

In her first review for Rogue Diplomat, Kate McCarthy reviews a Romanian Film that made a big impression at last year’s Cannes film festival, as well as looking the blossoming Romanian Film Industry. Kate currently works for the Irish Film Institute in Dublin and holds an MA in Media Studies & International Conflict.

“Have we left one cave for an even bigger cave?”

Questions of New Romanian Cinema

Police, Adjective, winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is the new offering from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, and the latest in a series of critically-lauded productions that have given rise to the ‘Romanian New Wave’. The excitement that surrounds current Romania’s contemporary national cinema looks set to continue with this clever and intriguing feature. Set in the town of Vaslui, it tells the story of Cristi, a young policeman in post-Ceausescu Romania, who is faced with an ethical dilemma when ordered by his superiors to arrest a young teenage boy for sharing marijuana with his friends – an offence that would result in a prison sentence of between 3 and 7 years.

Much of the action focuses on Cristi’s quiet trailing of the boy back and forth from his school playground. In what has become an almost recognisable Romanian style there are numerous long takes, as Cristi stands for hours in the autumnal streets outside the teenager’s house, his solitary and dispassionate fulfilment of police procedure broken intermittently by dry exchanges with his colleagues or his wife.

Romanian cinema has garnered increasing critical and scholarly attention over the last decade, and despite the dangers of generalising about an entire national cinema, it is difficult not to make connections between Police, Adjective and other recent productions, particularly Porumboiu’s earlier work - 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), and Cristi Puiu’s excellent The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). For these films arguably have as much to say about Romania as they do about their individual characters. And it is the darker aspect of Romanian life and society that these directors have set out to explore.

In 12:08 East of Bucharest three men hold a television panel discussion about whether or not there was a revolution in their town in the hours before Ceausescu fled Bucharest in December 1989.  As social and personal memories come to light through the interactions of an eclectic band of characters, there is no escape from the pervading (though not entirely humourless) cynicism with which the Romanian citizens view their contemporary environment. One of the men on the panel, a teacher, had earlier that day scolded his students for failing an exam on the Ottoman Empire. On asking the students what subject they all knew sufficiently well to retake the test, they replied “The French Revolution”. In the television studio, a band practises a lively Latino tune, before the angry intervention of the studio owner Jderescu, who demands that they play a Romanian song. Later on the panel Jderescu provocatively asks his viewers, “Have we left one cave for an even bigger cave?”

Frustration with elements of the post-Communist nation is made even more overt in Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lavarescu, in which an ambulance medic spends an entire night wheeling her dying patient from hospital to hospital in search of care, finding only a bureaucratic nightmare of uninterested or patronizing doctors. Nurse Mioara, like Cristi, finds herself the prisoner of a system that will not allow her to act on moral conviction. While remaining emotionally unattached from Mr Lavarescu personally, she is furious that she is unable to do anything to save him.       

Watch the official trailer for Police, Adjective

In Police, Adjective Cristi is trapped within definitions of ‘law’, finding it increasingly difficult to balance his job as an enforcer of constitutional law with his own notions of morality and logic. Early on in the film another policeman comes to him asking to join a game of foot-tennis. Cristi refuses, saying that he had seen the man playing football badly, and that it must follow that the man would be terrible at foot-tennis. That is his logic. “That’s the law”, he says to the disgusted officer.

In two humorous scenes he debates the laws of semantics and grammar with his wife, a teacher. She tells him that he had spelled a word wrong in his case report, according to recent grammatical guidelines. “Who sets these crazy rules?” Cristi demands, unconvinced at the logic of changing a word that he had been using his entire life. And finally, in a brilliant scene towards the end of the film Cristi is made by his superior to read definitions of the words “Conscience”, “Moral”, “Law” and “Police” from a dictionary, in an effort to convince him that his misinterpretation of such words render invalid his arguments against arresting the teenage pot-smoker.

Police, Adjective will certainly not appeal to everyone. Unlike many crime dramas there are no speeding car chases or bloody shoot-outs, and Cristi’s ethical protests are expressed without the emotional conventions of clenched fists and raised voices. The protagonist’s solitary police surveillance unfolds before us without the familiar build-up of suspense and the predictability of a successful moral outcome, and I am sure, consequently, that for some viewers the experience will be much akin to watching paint dry for two hours. For others, this will be one of the most interesting films you see this year.

For more on Police, Adjective, visit the official website here.